L'esprit de cette femme est le triomphe d'un art tout plastique, reprit Blondet. Vous ne saurez pas ce qu'elle a dit, mais vous serez charmé. Elle aura hoché la tête, ou gentiment haussé ses blanches épaules, elle aura doré une phrase insignifiante par le sourire d'une petite moue charmante, ou a mis l'épigramme de Voltaire dans un *hein*! dans un *ah*! dans un *et donc*! [...] C'est des grandeurs artificielles obtenues par des petites superlatives” (*CH* IV, PP)\n\nHer self-expression is that of pure surface. Her talent is limited to her body: clothing it or moving it. Even in her speech, it is not the content of her communication that charms her listener so much as the way she communicates it. She is the embodiment of style without substance. Furthermore, that style is citational. If she expresses the wit of Voltaire with a *hein*!, it is not as much an indication of her Enlightened mind as a reflection of her interlocutor’s intelligence. Voltaire’s riddles only made sense to an exceptionally literate, and creative reader. Ultimately, if “grandeurs artificielles” are the signs under which the talented, intelligent *femme comme il faut* circulates, her body, mind and self-expression are mere reproductions of her male company.\n\nBoth the *courtisane*’s appeal to upper-class men and the anxiety she evokes stem from her deceptive resemblance to “proper” women: at the masquerade ball in the dramatic opening scene of *La Torpille*, the successful arriviste Eugène de Rastignac mistakes Esther for Mme de\nSérizy, a “femme comme il faut” (443). The *courtisane* is also a reflection of men’s desire. While sexual desire is seen as potentially dangerous, the insatiable desire for wealth and status is the power driving the new bourgeois capitalist order. As Christopher Prendergast explains in *Paris and the Nineteenth Century* ‘courtisane’ is not the same as prostitute. […] he ‘courtisane’ is in part a moralized image, an expression of anxiety. But it is also an image connoting glamour, excitement, the great cosmetic game of leisure and pleasure in the modern city, part of the normal apparatus of civilized ‘commerce.’ (137)\n\nBernheimer takes up the anxiety that the confusion of a *courtisane* with a proper woman represents: he begins by asking whether Balzac’s depiction of prostitutes might have served as a site of resistance to the perceived loss of social distance. “The courtesan’s refined talent as an actress, her ability to disguise her venality and control the signs of her sexual availability, terrifies [Parent-Duchâtlet], whereas Balzac finds this metamorphic capacity eminently novelistic.” (34). Bernheimer thus considers briefly that Balzac may have found it productive to underscore a resemblance between the Romantic view of prostitution and the creative work of an author. However, he then promptly dismisses this possibility, arguing—correctly—that the narrative of *Splendeurs et Misères* evokes Esther Gobseck, the beautiful prostitute in love with Lucien, “only the better to bring disciplinary energies against her disintegrative threat” (39).\n\nFor Bernheimer, the central threat is “female sexuality” writ large, which is one of very few points in this intelligent work that could stand to be reconsidered, as it witnesses to the strong psychoanalytic bent of literary criticism in the 1990s. I generally agree with his conclusion that the novel’s depiction of Vautrin’s control of Esther’s sexuality offers a view of how Balzac coopts to his view of authorship the liquidity of signs—the collapse of distance—on which capitalist society depends, even as he remains distrustful of its tendency toward\nYet, in locating the degenerative threat of the venal woman *solely* in her role as a phantasmatic object of male desire, Bernheimer actually erases a difference of significant importance in the late 1830’s: while Vautrin is indeed representative of the author’s narrative energy, Esther is the one of the two who actually produces any writing. I would like to re-pose the question of the distance not only between fille and feuilletoniste but between courtisane and author.\n\nInstead of asking immediately—in line with Bernheimer’s model—whether Balzac’s work resists or affirms the commodification of the writer, it is useful to simply consider for a moment Balzac’s decision to expend at least two novels’ worth of ink on the very juxtaposition. I am drawing here on a paradigm shift performed by queer theorists like Katheryn Stockton, who find that a search for resistance and/or subversion to a dominant discourse—regardless of whether the ultimate result is to affirm or deny it—risks precluding other, more useful, questions. In *Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame*, Stockton reconsiders race and sexuality in through a lens of “debasement,” which, she writes, has often been read as a sign of marginality to a dominant discourse (24). She advocates asking, instead, what a literary text imagines could come of taking pleasure—sexual and/or aesthetic—in something like debasement. For our purposes, we might consider the identity-affirming pleasure in the degeneration or degradation that a balzacian “author” character might appear to undergo. This allows us to ask, as Stockton does, what occupying the position targeted by dominant shaming “produces, at certain moments, for those who actually undergo it, who, in a manner of speaking, practice it” (ibid). In light of this, I propose that novelists like Balzac found a certain productive delight and/or utility in owning the\n\n---\n\n15 “Vautrin takes over the [degenerative] powers ascribed to Esther’s erotic body,” which, says Bernheimer, displaces “the erotic lure from the represented novelistic world […] to the narrative function itself” (67).\ndegradation of their own career during the period of rapid technological, social and economic changes that they felt resulted in a “literary crisis.”\n\nOn the one hand, writing and promoting novels that established the novelist as a public figure who could wield narrative control over marginal, working-class, transgressive figures, like prostitutes and criminals produced the modern author as an artist who pushed the limits of prior aesthetic boundaries. This is part of what is going on: it is a shift in what Jacques Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime” in *The Politics of Aesthetics*: the nineteenth century realist novel, for example, was an unstable terrain out of which was born the “modernist regime, which defined art by its privileging of form over content. On the other hand, producing the modern author as a figure who moved among marginal, working-class, transgressive figures shaped the field in a more immediate way: doing so produced an image of the literary profession itself as a terrain that was more hazardous to women than to men. While this meant that some male writers would also be compared to the characters they depicted—accused, for example, of being prostituted themselves—such a comparison would ultimately be less harmful to a man’s reputation than to a woman’s.\n\nWhat, then, is desired, and what is produced, by texts in which a professional writer such as Balzac overtly depicts commercial writing—his own profession—as a venal practice? While it is true that the novels identify journalism with prostitution, and prostitution with degradation/degeneration, it is also true that there is an identification of the prostitute with the writer—both introduced into the narrative from the outside by the use of the common metaphor and coming from within the story in the form of prostitutes who read and/or write. The “readerly pleasure” that Bernheimer takes in Balzac’s controlling narrative of control over the prostitute is\ninseparable from the metaphor that situates the commercial writer in a position of prostitutional degradation.\n\nAssuming that it was, in fact, productive for Balzac to underscore a resemblance between the view of prostitution as degradation and the creative work of an author, what did doing so produce? Two things. First, it produces literary genius as the sign of difference between the proper author and the venal one flooding and corrupting the market (l’auteur qu’il ne faut pas, if you will). Secondly, making the prostitute a writer points out that her journalist lover is not only similar to her in their labor (both sell themselves), but also in their mental capacity. Sitting with the degradation of a member of Balzac’s profession is productive of a definition of the unsuccessful writer: the man who writes like a courtisane. This establishes a feminine mind—in lieu of venality—as the primary obstacle in the way of the femme auteur.\n\nWhy not just write scathing reviews of women novelists’ works? Several critics, novelists and journalists did attack the figure of the femme auteur directly. Balzac, however, only wrote one novel doing so: La Muse du département depicts a woman writer who moves from the provinces to Paris, abandoning her domestic duties and her morals. It was poorly received, and accused of being petty and vindictive (Cohen 181). I maintain, therefore, that he redirected his desire to undermine women authors, and that it surfaces in his representation of the provincial male author and the literate venal woman.\n\nIn Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères, Balzac tries something different. Rather than depicting a male writer’s command of the public sphere as superior to a woman writer’s, he shows a male writer who fails: Lucien first fails to understand how the commercial literary market works, then he fails to master the command of life-as-fiction that is required to\nsuccessfully navigate the new capitalist social order. This failure, however, is pinned directly on his *courtisane*-like nature.\n\nAt the end of the first volume of *Illusions perdues* (published in 1836), Lucien leaves for Paris as a poet and novelist, and the protégé of a provincial noble. Half way through *Un grand homme de provinces à Paris*—and shortly after his decision to become a journalist—Lucien appears coupled with a prostitute (the kept actress, Coralie). However (at least to those who had already read *La Torpille*, which happens sequentially later, but was published earlier) when Lucien first arrives in Paris he has already—in the mind of both the author and his readers—been equated with the *courtisane*, Esther. In effect, his reputation is tarnished almost before he has begun.\n\nLucien de Rubempré’s spectacular return to Paris is analogous to the arrival of a *grande courtisane* into bourgeois society. In the opening scene of *La Torpille*, Lucien circulates unmasked at a masquerade ball, the dazzling object of every eye. While Lucien is looking for Esther (of whose venality he is not yet technically aware), everyone else is looking at him, appreciatively but analytically: Balzac’s opening scene places at center stage the figure of the *flâneur* who looks without buying, and, moreover, can even be seen as “merchandise” in Walter Benjamin’s view (42).\n\nLike the *courtisane*, the instability of Lucien’s class is immediately readable on the very allure of his body: “Quoique sa beauté le classât parmi ces personnages exceptionnels qui viennent au bal de l’Opéra pour y avoir une aventure […], il paraissait bourgeoisement sûr de sa soirée” (*CH VI*, 430). As Laure Katsaros argues in *Un Nouveau monde amoureux: célibataire et prostituées au XIXe siècle*, a study of the analogous social position occupied by single men and\npublic women, the dandy is simultaneously emblematic of post-Revolutionary social instability and the production of a new societal structure founded on consumer capitalism.\n\nAnd yet, the glamorous beauty of the young dandy is quickly perceived as a mask that blurs not only his provincial bourgeois origins but also covers the traces of his prior descent into the mire of Parisian society. Indeed, the narrator explains, beauty and youth can cover “de profonds abîmes,” but not for long.¹⁶ Lucien’s past is revealed by _une femme comme il faut_ who summarizes the yet-unpublished account of his stint in Paris—his first failure to live out the _arriviste_ plot—thus: “Quoi ! c’est ce fils d’apothicaire de qui elle [Mme du Châlelet] s’était amourachée, qui s’est fait journaliste, l’amant de Mlle Coralie?” (432).\n\nIf Lucien’s provincial bourgeois origins were immediately apparent in his manner, it is the trace of his Parisian adventures that constitute the “abîmes” referred to above. It is this experience that effectively lowers his proper social standing from that of the ambiguously-classed dandy fancied by a noble woman, to that of a journalist and an actress’ lover: the narrative later clarifies that Coralie had actually financially supported Lucien, making him doubly dependent on venal income. The loss of both moral and social standing is reflected by a literal descent into the streets of Paris, as is connoted by “abîmes.” If the apparent causality between a career in journalism and a relationship with an actress were not clear enough to conflate the two dubious professions, the equation of journalism with filth—particularly sewage—will align Lucien’s turn to commercial writing with the lowest form of sexual venality.\n\nBalzac was familiar with _La Prostitution dans la ville de Paris_ written in 1836 by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, the public hygienist whose first project was a study of sewers; a similar mentality frames Parent-Duchâtelet’s recommendation to accept the presence of\n\n---\n\n¹⁶ In Paris, the narrator says, “il est une façon d’être qui révèle ce que vous êtes, ce que vous faites, d’où vous venez, et ce que vous voulez” (431).\nprostitutes as a system of outlets for safely directing excess male desire away from the scene of proper bourgeois domesticity. While Balzac does not press on this metaphor as much as other authors (see chapter two), a few pages later, when Lucien greets some fellow writers, the equation of commercial writing with the filth of “the streets” is explicit: journalism is an underworld where “on y trempe,” where deals are made with “les plus fétides bassesses,” and where one must “salir les doigts” (437). True to his courtisane-esque initial appearance, whatever social interactions Lucien may undertake from this point forth in Splendeurs et misères, he has already been inextricably sullied—socially and morally—by his formation in the venal world of journalism. The journalist and venal woman are both “degraded”: they both are seen as the product of a lower class, which is synonymous with a base morality.\n\nAs readers of the first edition of Un grand homme published the following year would see, when Lucien becomes a journalist he necessarily prostitutes his literary talent. Representatives of the two seemingly opposing camps of writers that Lucien joins both equate writing for newspapers with an irreparable descent into sexual venality. Michel Chrestien, of the anti-commercial Cénacle, tells Lucien that he could never forgive the young poet should he decide to support himself by committing his pen to writing biased reviews of other artists’ hard work: he calls journalism “le parti pris de trafiquer de son âme, de son esprit et de sa pensée” (CH V: 328). Similarly, Etienne Lousteau, the commercial writer par excellence, admits to his own loss of purity as a result of becoming a critic whose pen is directed by the trivial business of the presses rather than higher artistic ideals: “Et j’étais bon ! J’avais le coeur pur : […] Enfin,\n\n17 For an extended analysis of the equation of prostitutes with sewers in De la prostitution à Paris, see Charles Bernheimer’s chapter on Parent-Duchâtelet’s work in Figures of Ill Repute, op. cit. and Jonathan Strauss’ more recent work, Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris, New York: Fordham UP, 2012.\npour un exemplaire refusé par le libraire à mon journal, je dis du mal d’un livre que je trouve beau!” (344). An innocent writer’s purity of heart, soul and mind would be lost forever at the moment a price is put on it in the dank, immoral world of journalism.\n\nThe irreversible commodification of Lucien, the inevitable outcome of his stated attempt to “triumph” as a journalist (348), is confirmed by the response to his début theatre review: “je suis obligé de vous dire tout simplement que vous êtes un homme d’esprit, de coeur et de style,” says Blondet; but the immediate reply of the newspaper editor Adroche Finot is telling: “Monsieur est du Journal, dit Finot en remerciant Étienne et lui jetant le fin regard de l’exploitateur” (400). By accepting Lousteau’s introduction into the world of journalism, the man of wit, heart and style becomes the property of the newspaper. What Lucien had expected to be an apprenticeship is, in fact (and had been from the beginning), pure exploitation.\n\nThis “formation as degradation” makes Lucien all the more similar to the courtisane whom he was seeking at the beginning of La Torpille. We learn from those watching Lucien that he returned to Paris accompanied by Esther Gobseck, the equally mesmerizing young woman who had become known as “La Torpille,” for her ability to swiftly inflame the desires any man she meets. Like Lucien, however, her elegance fails to cover her past, at least to those in the know. The onlookers agree that she began as a typical fille perdue. Blondet attributes her fall to her early formation in the theatre world as a “rat,” defined as “un enfant de dix à onze ans, comparse à quelque théâtre […] que les débauches formaient pour le vice et l’infamie […] une espèce de page infernal, un gamin femelle à qui se pardonnaient les bons tours” (CH VI, 440).\n\nFrom this exploitation to the next, it was only a matter of time before the young person (of uncertain or unstable gender) became a “fille de joie.” Her beauty is thus, like Lucien’s,\npurely theatrical; and, also like Lucien’s, covers her inextricable association with filth: Esther, says Finot, “a barboté dans la rue, [...] a roulé dans la fange” (441).\n\nYet, as the daughter of a Jewish money-lender and a prostitute, Esther’s other onlookers add, she was, in fact, born lost to society and morality. Therefore, if Esther was destined from birth to embody the most socially unacceptable forms of exchange, her contact with the theatre world only enabled her to do so effectively. The theatre taught the “gamin femelle” that femininity was an artifice, like any other: one to be manipulated in the interest of her tricks.\n\nIn mapping this aspect of the courtisane on to the journalist as well, we can now see that Lucien’s “fall” from literary grace into journalism in Un grand homme is equally illusory. His infamous visit to the Galerie de Bois—the shared home of prostitution and book publication—proves that he actually prostitutes his own writing before turning to journalism, as Franc Schuerewegen has argued in his deconstruction of the supposed distance between literary manuscript and newspaper article:\n\nLucien, si l’on peut dire, ‘sollicite’ un genre de transaction dont sa naïveté devrait le tenir à l’écart. ‘Prostituant la Muse’ [CH V, 365] parmi celles qui prostituent leur corps, le jeune homme sait vendre (se vendre) avant même que le mécanisme de la vente ne lui ait été expliqué. L’épisode des Galeries de Bois confirme donc [...] que le rapport entre manuscrit et authenticité artistique, celui-là étant l’emblème de celle-ci, s’avère somme toute douteux. (83)\n\n---\n\n18 For the relationship between prostitution and money lending, see Maurice Samuels, “Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,” Romanic Review 97.2 (2006): 169-84.\n\nIf the manuscript is falsely pure, Schweregen argues, Lucien nonetheless parades the illusory innocence of his writing in much the same way that the *courtisane* treats femininity as an artifice. Lucien’s behavior effectively reveals the possibility for venality, even in the world of novels and poetry.\n\nIndeed, even before entering the Galeries de Bois, the Parisian site that compromised the virtue of both women and writers until 1830, Lucien had already viewed his work as a source of exchange value. In his letter to his sister, he reveals an exploitive attitude not unlike Finot’s toward his works, assigning to both his novel and book of poetry a monetary value sufficient to, at the very least, clothe their author: “D’ici là j’aurais sans doute vendu *L’Archer de Charles IX* et *Les Marguerites*. N’ayez donc aucune inquiétude à mon sujet. Si le présent est froid, nu, mesquin, l’avenir est bleu, riche et splendide. La plupart des grands hommes ont éprouvé les vicissitudes qui m’affectent sans m’accabler” (*CH* V, 292-93). The future he envisions here, where his current nakedness is clothed by the splendid trappings of greatness, does—temporarily—become reality in the sequel to *Illusions perdues*... even if the *splendeurs* are the superficial ones of dandies and *courtisanes*.\n\nAt this point, then, we must return to Esther’s story, the depiction of which reverses the metaphor of the prostituted journalist: now the *courtisane* is depicted as a member of the intellectual elite. If Lucien’s journalism constitutes as false a loss of artistic merit as Esther’s profession was a loss of innocence, their similarity reveals a fiction at the heart of the metaphor: that comparing the journalist to the prostitute works only in one direction. Ideally, the comparison would merely connote the degradation of the commodified writer. Balzac’s use of it, however, also grants the venal woman a place in the literary world.\nThe following portrait of the *courtisane* by the journalist Blondet traces the story of the failed poet back onto the prostituted woman, mediated through the elegant appearance of *courtisane*: “Quelle perte irréparable fait l’élite de la littérature, de la science, de l’art et de la politique! dit Blondet. La Torpille est la seule fille de joie en qui s’est rencontrée l’étoffe d’une belle courtisane ; l’instruction ne l’avait pas gâtée, elle ne sait ni lire ni écrire : elle nous aurait compris” (440). Granted, given that Esther could neither read nor write, her membership in this elite society is as unfounded as Lucien’s appearance at the ball, where he circulates penniless among the rich.\\(^{20}\\) And yet, the illiterate *courtisane* is paradoxically identified as the “ideal reader” of the writer, the scientist, the artist and the politician... though not necessarily of their works.\n\nFor Balzac’s journalist, Esther’s *inability* to read and write is, in fact, a guarantee of her potential proficiency with a different type of cultural literacy, and engagement in literary circles: “elle ne sait ni lire ni écrire : elle nous aurait compris. Nous aurions doté notre époque d’une de ces magnifiques figures aspasiennes sans lesquelles il n’y a pas de grand siècle” (440). In his *éloge* to the hypothetical Esther, the journalist Émile Blondet compares her to French *courtisanes* past who influenced patronage, and the muses of ancient poets. She would, in essence, support and inspire poetry, but not write it. He regrets the loss of a modern *salonnière*, evoking the literary debates of the mid 1830s through a reference to censorship and its paradoxical promotional power: “On aurait lu chez elle quelque chef-d’œuvre dramatique défendu qu’on aurait au besoin fait faire exprès” (441). This imaginary illiterate queen of a literary circle constitutes the ideal *salonnière* who harnesses the power of her sex appeal and social\n\n\\(^{20}\\) It is perhaps notable that the Galeries de Bois are compared to the *bal masqué* in *Un grand homme* (CH V, 360).\nconnections to promote writers and their work. While she does not appear in Illusions perdues, Blondet’s portrait of Esther in this light establishes her link to the world of literary criticism.\n\nHer illiteracy also serves as a placeholder for her sexual transgression, on which depends the courisane’s place in Balzac’s Paris and Blondet’s imaginary salon. When Blondet says that “l'instruction ne l’avait pas gâtée, elle ne sait ni lire ni écrire,” the idea that education would have “ruined” Esther in the journalist’s view is more about morality than literacy. Her illiteracy should have been utterly unremarkable to her observers: it would have been extraordinary for a girl of her social standing to have received a primary education before 1836. Nevertheless, any “instruction” she might have received would have been, according to historian Roger Price, “based upon particular conceptions of womanhood, and on the functions of women within the family and community. For most of the century the dominant model was that of la jeune fille chrétienne, an idealization of the Virgin Mary, pious and modest” (319). While, on one hand, Blondet’s appreciative depiction of Esther as a salonnière reads as a critique of the value of such religious education, on the other hand, it also casts a shadow of sexual transgression onto the modern salonnière who immodestly surrounds herself with public men, perhaps to the detriment of her family.\n\nThrough the collapse of Esther’s illiteracy with her ability to understand and promote Blondet and his circle of intellectual elites, the journalist produces as the ideal salonnière a woman of poetic mind who, nevertheless, cannot participate in the creative work of the men she brings together. He also depicts a woman whose company is restricted to that of men, given her\n\n---\n\n21 Or after. It would take time to build the infrastructure initiated by the 1833 and 1836 Guizot laws aimed at providing primary education for boys, and then girls, in every commune across France. And while these laws included provisions to ensure access even to families unable to pay the provision scolaire, attendance remained generally low for all children of working-class families, and even lower for girls.\nlack of initiation into—or rejection by—proper female society. Blondet’s salonnière is thereby no less of a courtisane: if the latter exists to satisfy the sexual desires of the upper-class men who frequent her, his imaginative depiction of Esther produces the former as a woman whose purpose is the analogous satisfaction of the literary desire—or ambition—of the men in her circle.\n\nIf Blondet appreciates the fact that Esther had been spared religious instruction, Balzac offers his reader the following thought experiment: what happens when a courtisane is sent to “une maison célèbre par l’éducation aristocratique et religieuse qui s’y donne” (463)? While she does come out duly judgmental of her former life, Esther also demonstrates that a venal woman who grew up in the theatre is—as a blank slate par excellence—the ideal proper woman. At the convent, her body proves as malleable as a doll: “Esther possédait cette moyenne taille qui permet de faire d’une femme une sorte de joujou, de la prendre, quitter, reprendre et porter sans fatigue” (464). If her body is easily re-covered, her comportment is similarly open to revision. Her formation is, the narrator says, in part, an exercise in forgetting her past, as if her mind were in the hands of a student who erases the slate before writing something else.\n\nIf her past constituted a roll in the mire, once placed in a different social setting, her theater training actually makes Esther the perfect student of aristocratic manners: “Esther eut bientôt pris les manières, la douceur de voix, le port et les attitudes de ces filles si distinguées [...]. Ces femmes n’avaient jamais, dans leur carrière d’enseignement, rencontré naturel plus aimable, douceur plus chrétienne, modestie plus vraie, ni se grand désir d’apprendre” (467). Vautrin confirms that her education had successfully produced (or reproduced) Esther as “une femme comme il faut.” This, he says, would allow Lucien to make an ideal salonnière of her.\n\n22 Blondet’s description of Esther hereby recalls the description of the femme supérieure and woman author Dinah de la Baudraye in Balzac’s 1837 novel La Muse du département: having driven away all the women of Sancerre with her preference for discussing only the latest developments in art, literature and science, she holds a salon populated mostly by men: “Dinah fut donc regardée comme monstrueuse et dangereuse, et le désert se fit autour d’elle” (CH IV).\n“Elle peut, elle doit devenir, sous l’empire de ton amour, une Ninon, une Marion de Lorme, une Dubarry, comme le disait ce journaliste à l’Opéra” (478-479). However, unlike these women, who all occupied a highly visible position in French society, and who used their education to write their own memoires, the reformed, literate Esther will be sequestered in an apartment, unseen, for years, existing only for Lucien. She becomes the ideal domestic outlet for desires that could distract her man from successfully mastering the public sphere. In this role, however, she does actually bring to fruition Blondet’s fantasy of the illiterate salonnière who uses her wit to produce the men around her, and increase their market value, without creating any original literature-caliber writing of her own.\n\nEsther is not technically illiterate. She learns to read and write at the religious school that Vautrin, under the guise of Herera, gets her admitted to. However, she uses literacy only to bring to life the product of a masculine imagination. In the very first letter she writes, Esther uses her newly-acquired literacy to represent herself as the embodiment of Lucien’s dream: the passionate mistress and the ideal proper woman. Writing to Vautrin, she paints a portrait of herself as virginal, faithfully in love with Lucien, and self-effacing: “j’emploie, pour la première fois, la faculté d’exprimer mes pensées [...] à peindre un amour que Lucien a peut-être oublié” (479). As a result of her catechesis, she sees herself as a receptive vessel: “La cérémonie d’hier a versé les trésors de la grâce en moi [...] et j’ai reçu le corps sacré de notre Sauveur” (ibid). Her citation of the biblical rhetoric confirms that her religious education had the effect of forming her in mid-century bourgeois ideals of maternity: the female body as a receptacle is both sanctified and in accordance with civic duty.23\n\nYet, even as Esther portrays herself as the product of female education that took the\nvirgin Mary for a model, her writing reveals a trace of her original education in the theatre (or\nperhaps merely exposes the similarity of it to the best religious training): she depicts the\ncelebration of baptism as a star theatrical performance: “En ce moment, [...] je n’étais plus une\nfemme, je naissais à une vie de lumière, au milieu des acclamations de la terre, admirée par le\nmonde, dans un nuage d’encens et de prières qui enivrait, et parée comme une vierge” (479).\nIntoxicated by the lights and a cheering audience, but in a church instead of a theatre, Esther\nsimultaneously embodies Lucien’s past desires for the proper high-society woman (Mme de\nBargeton) and for the sexually-available actress (Coralie).\n\nYet this paradoxical embodiment of opposites is also in accordance with the citation-\nbased behavior of *la femme comme il faut*: “Elle va rarement à l’église, mais elle parlera religion\n[...]. Elle entame un discours néo-chrétien saupoudré d’idées politiques, qui n’est ni catholique ni\nprotestant, mais moral [...] où vous reconnaissiez une pièce de chaque étoffe qu’ont tissue les\ndoctrines modernes aux prises” (*AEF* 28). The stitched-together ideas on morality donned by the\nproper woman reflect Esther “parée comme une vierge”: the outcome of both women’s religious\neducation is an improved ability to clothe themselves according to the fashion.\n\nIn her correspondence with Nucingen, Esther similarly reproduces herself exactly as the\nwealthy baron sees her: as a work of art to be purchased and displayed as a sign of its owner’s\nwealth and good taste. However, her first two letters to him make the successful capitalist\nphysically ill by tearing the mask off the *courtisane*, exposing the desire of a capitalist. Her\nwriting makes her own body a reflection of the horrifying void of capitalism, the degrading\nexchange of a person for money: she refers to herself as “une pauvre fille qui doit être une\nesclave” (*CH VI* 603). Her letter, she states, acts as a receipt, showing proof of his part in her\ndehumanizing commodification: “Vous avez payé, je me dois.” His resulting unease serves Balzac’s goal of exposing the inextricable link between capitalism and fictions of altruism. On Vautrin’s command, which he frames as a call to sacrifice herself for Lucien, Esther agrees to enter back into the profitable fiction that disguises prostitution as genuine affection.\n\nFor the literate courtisane, writing serves as an extension of adorning her body in the interest of extracting more money from a client. Directing her housekeeper, Europe, to help her prepare for Nucingen’s visit, Esther says, “Nous allons rire, c’est-à-dire, nous allons travailler;” to which the narrator adds: “Elle se mit à table, et écrivit la lettre suivante” (614). In this letter, disavowing her previously-stated intent to commit suicide after giving herself to the baron, Esther contradicts her own earlier writing, recalling Lucien’s opposing literary reviews in Illusions perdues (CH V, 460: we will return to this scene in our discussion of Lucien).\n\nIf she was not conscious of using her writing to depict herself in accordance with Lucien’s desire, she is aware of doing so when writing to Nucingen. Esther seems to purposefully embrace the degrading notion that the courtisane is pure surface, with no innate desires of her own to get in the way of interpreting her lover’s fantasies, using the trope to her advantage. She presents herself as “une femme achetée” who, in order to better please her buyer, disguises the exchange of pleasure for money under the fiction that she is, in fact, a “bonne fille.” This performance of the proper woman’s obedience means, paradoxically, projecting herself as the object of his desire for the very opposite of a good girl: “Vous trouverez sous les armes, et parée de vos dons, celle qui se dit, pour la vie, votre machine à plaisir” (CH VI 615). The phrase “sous les armes” usually means dressed in full armor, but, used idiomatically, means armed with feminine charms: “tous les moyens pour plaire et pour séduire.”\n\n---\n\nsurface of Esther’s body—armed and “parée”—is a reflection of Nucingen’s views of her: she is both his conquest and the return on his investment.\n\nOne might be tempted to conclude from this letter—a performance in writing that Esther herself sees as labor—that she uses her ability to write in order to produce herself, as product, from which she will be the one to profit. However, the self that circulates in her letter is actually a product alienated from its producer: she portrays herself in accordance to Nucingen’s desire. This ultimately equates her writing to the kind of journalistic production of articles as commodities, the circulation of which enriches the editor, not the writer.\n\nIn short, whether she writes as a proper woman or in the deceptive role of the courtisane, Esther embodies the ideal woman writer. If she reproduces another in her writing, it is not her own view but someone else’s that circulates. If she produces herself, that “self” is ultimately the product of a male imagination. As a product of writing that contains no original thought, nothing of substance, the selves that her writing makes circulate exist as pure exchange value. Like the body of the woman holding the pen, feminine writing is pure surface on which are transcribed the thoughts of an absent, authoritative other.\n\n**Conclusion: Apprentissage manqué**\n\nBefore I conclude, let me briefly relate the question of education of young men and young women back to the Parisian literary world’s anxiety over distinguishing argent from oripeaux during the literary crisis of the late 1830s. Esther is not the only uneducated prostitute in this pair of novels whose sex appeal supplements a certain natural, qua physical, knowledge. The narrator of *Un grand homme* seems to reference “instruction” to suggest a parallel between Esther and the actress Coralie, whose theatrical talent is also not the result of any proper\nschooling: “semblable à beaucoup d’actrices, Coralie, sans esprit malgré son ironie de coulisses, sans instruction malgré son expérience de boudoir, n’avait que l’esprit des sens et la bonté des femmes amoureuses” (CH VI, 387). Like Esther, she is “sans instruction,” that is, doubly protected from exercising the judgment of a typical bourgeois woman—the product of a religious education—by her two-fold marginality as both low-class actress and as a “type sublime de la figure juive,” (387). Furthermore, like Esther, Coralie’s formation took place in the theatre; like the courisane, the femme comme il faut, and the beautiful journalist she falls in love with, mastery of her appearance functions as a form of intelligence.25\n\nFor Lucien, his literary talent is equally a theatrical performance. While he arrives in Paris as the presumed author of L’Archer de Charles IX, his book only gets published once d’Arthez essentially rewrites it for him. Furthermore, while Lucien is the purported author of Les Marguerites, Balzac’s more savvy reader would have recognized certain poems written by real authors, including Delphine de Girardin, among the fictitious “original” sonnets that appear in the novel’s pages. Lucien’s quest of adopting a noble last name is thus far from the ideal of “une noble et pure renommée” that the character “Honoré de Balzac, the author” set up in the preface to Illusions perdues. Circulating publically under the name of “de Rubempré” is equivalent to playing one of several opposing roles in the drama of the battle over what is proper to the literary realm. Blondet, directing him in the series of contradictory reviews he will write of a fellow writer’s book, tells him exactly how to praise the book he had just lambasted in articles he had signed C. and L.. He instructs Lucien to sign this review de Rubempré (460). While the naïve writer recoils initially, he is won over by the promise of four-hundred francs, and is appeased by Coralie’s equation of writing reviews to acting: “Fais de la critique, […] amuse-toi ! Est-ce que\n\n25 Lousteau, with his typical eye to the exchange value of art, says this: “À dix-huit ans, Coralie pourra dans quelques jours avoir soixante mille francs par an pour sa beauté. Elle est encore très sage” (388).\nje ne suis pas ce soir en Andalouse, demain ne me mettrai-je pas en bohémienne, un autre jour en homme ? Fais comme moi, donne-leur des grimaces pour leur argent, et vivons heureux” (461). Coralie’s talent makes her body the perfect surface onto which one can project any nationality, class or even sex; Lucien, while a talented writer, only puts into circulation other people’s ideas. His writing is the surface on which Blondet, d’Arthez, and others (including, later, Vautrin) write their own story.\n\nCoralie’s lack of education makes clear something that Esther’s only hints at: her “esprit” stands clearly in opposition not only to a frame of mind proper to women, but also to one proper to (select) men: genius. The complete description of Coralie offers an adjectival close-up to make Hollywood jealous: face, lips, chin, eyelids, lashes, hair... landing—a bit oddly—on her forehead, typically a rather unsexy body part. “Sur un front brun [...] siégeait une magnificence de pensée qui aurait pu faire croire à du génie. Mais, semblable à beaucoup d’actrices, Coralie [...] n’avait que l’esprit des sens...” (ibid). The narrator punctuates his elegy to Coralie’s beauty with a back-handed complement: she has such exquisite control over her body that one might have mistaken her for a person of genius, were it not for a mind ruled by her physical senses.\n\nThe fact that the journalist and arriviste is pure surface, void of interior substance, is the character flaw that is truly responsible for his failure to make it in the two novels that Balzac produces in the completion of Lucien’s roman d’apprentissage. In spite of pages of disillusioning revelations, Lucien’s apprentissage only results in a superior ability to clothe his body. His sentimental education is a flop.\n\nThe dissecting gaze of the narrator that gives the lie to the superficial glow of genius on Coralie’s forehead recalls the novelist Daniel d’Arthez and his warning to Lucien at their first encounter:\nVous avez au front le sceau du génie, dit d’Arthez à Lucien en lui jetant un regard qui l’enveloppa; si vous n’en avez pas au cœur la volonté, si vous n’en avez pas la patience angélique, si à quelque distance du but que vous mettent les bizarreries de la destinée vous ne reprennez pas [...] le chemin de votre infini [...] renoncez dès aujourd’hui. (311, *emphasis mine*)\n\nA *sceau* is both a sign and a seal: something that both reveals and closes off information. This one is true to form. First, Lucien appears here under the sign of genius. But it is unclear whether—for d’Arthez—this sign lifts the veil of a cleverly disguised ignorance, like Coralie’s, or genuinely witnesses to the writer’s potential for authentic, innate talent. The answer would, in d’Arthez’ system, be determined by whether or not Lucien’s heart bears the same sign as his forehead. An exterior sign by itself is no guarantee that what is represented without is contained within.\n\nIndeed, Lucien appears similarly indistinguishable from the elite, like every other Parisian dandy. However, the flattening of social difference that the dandy represents is also an intellectual poverty. In the portrait of “La femme comme il faut,” the dandy is the male equivalent of the woman whose genius is limited to citation and superficiality. It is worth considering here, in closing, the following lengthy definition of such a feminized man:\n\nLa pensée, prise comme un marteau et par l'enfant qui sort du collège et par le journaliste obscur, a démoli les magnificences de l'état social [...] Aujourd'hui, tout drôle qui peut convenablement soutenir sa tête sur un col, couvrir sa puissante poitrine d'homme d'une demi—aune de satin en forme de cuirasse, montrer un front où reluisse un génie apocryphe sous des cheveux bouclés, se dandiner sur deux escarpins vernis ornés de chaussettes en soie qui coûtent six francs, tient son lorgnon dans une de ses arcades sourcilières en\nplissant le haut de sa joue, et, fût-il clerc d'avoué, fils d'entrepreneur ou bâtard de banquier, il toise impertinemment la plus jolie duchesse, l'évalue quand elle descend l'escalier d'un théâtre, et dit à son ami habillé par Buisson, chez qui nous nous habillons tous, et monté sur vernis comme le premier duc venu, : − Voilà, mon cher, une femme comme il faut.\n\nFirst: that is a long sentence. The piling of details upon details attests not only to Balzac’s experience as a journalist for La Mode, but also proves the narrator’s equivalent mastery of the dandy’s style, in addition to which he alone possesses a superior level of judgment, or intellectual substance. Second, while this dandy knows where to buy his clothes and how to put them on, he is unable to distinguish between true nobility, “la plus jolie duchesse,” and its modern replacement, the proper woman of talent. The dandy thus represents a certain level of literacy unpaired with critical judgment necessary to actual genius, whence the glow of a “génie apocryphe.” In short, this figure is a product of the increased educational opportunities, from which Balzac himself benefited, but which, paradoxically, the narrator of this portrait would like to remain available only to an elite few.\n\nIn Un grand homme, D’Arthez’s concern for Lucien’s future reveals an underlying judgment that the dandy’s génie is merely superficial. His warning to Lucien, to grow some heart or go home, recalls Balzac’s own protective, paternalistic warning to his poetically-inclined readers. Unless this reader is already a pure and noble (male) author, Balzac seems to imply that taking up a pen will only ruin reputations, destroy families, and corrupt society. From with the novel framed by this warning, the figure of literary integrity shows his narrative superiority through his offer to educate his naïve friend. Through the process of disillusioning him, d’Arthez articulates Balzac’s specific understanding of literary genius.\nD’Arthez’ assessment highlights the following main attributes innate to the “grand écrivain,” or genius (in the economy of the Cénacle, at least): talent, persistence, and an intuitive ability to keep the goal in sight. These three traits could also be described as pouvoir, vouloir, and savoir, the three “components of novelistic genius” that Patrick Bray identifies as central to Balzac’s embedded theory of the novel in his reading of La Peau de chagrin and its preface.²⁶ As Bray writes, “only by combining all three can the writer of genius successfully create a masterpiece. Power, desire, and knowledge are not opposite poles on the axis of some mystical life force, but are intimately connected in the work of a genius” (72). All three must be available to a writer of genius, and the absence of any one of the three suffices to make genius illusory.\n\nThe year is 1847. The final volume of Honoré de Balzac’s *Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes* has at last been published. A writer exactly half Balzac’s age is seeking to launch his own career as a popular novelist. Well aware of the profitability of the prostitute’s narrative, twenty-four year-old Alexandre Dumas fils undertook to write his own version of one. The resulting novel, *La Dame aux camélias*, rewrites *L’Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut*, the 1731 novel by the Abbé Prévost, a work en vogue with the Romantics. Dumas’ book is organized around a first-person narration of the short but passionate affair between a naïve young man from the provinces, Armand Duval, and Marguerite Gautier, the Parisian *courtisane* who falls in love with him before dying of consumption.\n\nThe story draws on the writer’s personal experience in two ways. First, Dumas fictionalizes his brief affair with the famous *demi-mondaine* known as Marie Duplessis, whose recent death would have increased public interest in the novel. Second, by dramatizing the\n\n---\n\n1. If any single text could be said to function as a foundation for received ideas of the market in sexual and textual desires, it would be Abbé Antoine-François Prévost’s *Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut* (1731). The novel was beloved by writers and artists as well as the general public throughout the nineteenth century. The *Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle* says the following about the venal Manon and her naïve lover, Des Grieux: “[ce] sont des types qui resteront, que chacun connaît, et avec lesquels on croit avoir vécu, tant ils nous sont familiers” (vol. 10, 1092). The popular story also represented a path to commercial success. Re-imagined in print by George Sand in *Léone Léonie* (1835) and Alexandre Dumas fils in *La Dame aux camélias* (1848), and interpreted for the opera by Daniel Auber (*Manon Lescaut*, 1856), Jules Massenet (*Manon*, 1884) and of course Puccini (*Manon Lescaut*, 1893), Prévost's original text was also often re-issued as a best-selling classic by entrepreneurial *éditeurs* such as Alphonse Lemerre and the *frères* Gladys who sought out only the most profitable titles to include in collections of luxury volumes. On the nineteenth-century reception of Prévost’s novel, see Léon Cellier: “Le mythe de Manon et les romantiques français,” in *L’Abbé Prévost*, Actes du Colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, 1963, Ophrys, 1965; and J. P. Gilroy, *The Romantic Manon and des Grieux: Images of Prevost's Heroine and Hero in Nineteenth-century French literature*, Sherbrooke, P. Q., Naaman, 1980.\n\n2. The Parisian reader of 1848 would have easily recognized in Marguerite Gautier the story of Alphonsine Plessis, born to rural working-class parents in 1824, and established in the Parisian demi-monde by 1839. Dumas fils met her in 1845, when she was also found in the company of Jules Janin and Franz Liszt. One of her lovers married her, making her the Comtesse de Perregaux in 1846. She died, in debt, in 1847 at the age of twenty-three. For more\ncirculation of both writing and the writer as commodities, Dumas represents the challenges of working in the literary marketplace in the wake of the first-generation of self-produced “canonical” authors and literary critics—men like Balzac and Dumas père. The resulting novel, published in a two-volume set in 1848 by Alexandre Cadot, was immediately successful.³ And—what was perhaps of more importance to Dumas fils—it effectively brought the young writer out from beneath the shadow of Dumas père.\n\nThe figure of the Parisian novelist as public figure is present in the novel from the beginning. The author attributes to his frame narrator a defense of the book’s titular subject: the femme entretenue, a seductress held responsible for manipulating men’s sexual desire and women’s desire to consume. In it, he writes:\n\nHugo a fait Marion Delorme, Musset a fait Bernerette, Alexandre Dumas [père] a fait Fernande, les penseurs et les poètes de tous les temps ont apporté à la courtisane l’offrande de leur miséricorde. Si j’insiste sur ce point, c’est que parmi ceux qui vont me lire, beaucoup peut-être sont déjà prêts à rejeter ce livre, dans lequel ils craignent de ne voir qu’une apologie du vice et de la prostitution, et l’âge de l’auteur contribue sans doute encore à motiver cette crainte. (38)\n\nBeneath the pretense of mercifully depicting an exceptional courtisane—one capable of true love—the work hereby reveals a secondary theme no less central to the novel: the virtues of ambition. Here Dumas is interested in how one produces oneself as an exceptional writer—able to enter the circle of literary greats. Dumas’ narrator does not pretend that works alone are what\n\n³ In his rather flat preface to the book, Antoine Livio claims that the novel would quickly become “le bestseller du XIXe siècle,” (6). But no one has undertaken a Pleiade edition of the works of Dumas fils.\nmade these authors great; to the contrary, he observes that it is the writers’ pre-existing greatness that allows them to redeem the *courtisane* without damaging their own reputations: “quelques fois un grand homme les a réhabilitées de son amour et *même de son nom*” (emphasis mine). And yet, by undertaking a similar “rehabilitation” project, this nameless narrator seems to think that—in spite of his acknowledged youth and lack of accomplishments—he can create a similar name for himself.\n\nDumas demonstrates here a belief that it is possible to be the author of one’s own destiny, but only if the writer possesses, along with his literary talents, an exceptional degree of desire and drive. In *La Dame aux camélias*, we are in a new world, a capitalist world, in which social status and success are the products of education and ambition, and not of inheritance. That said, it is important to note that Dumas’ point was hardly new: as is well known, replacing inheritance with merit was a critical tenet of the 1789 Revolution. Education remains, at this point, a vehicle for the reproduction of class hierarchy: *fils* was educated because *père* acknowledged his bastard son and sent him to school, just as *père*’s father had done for him. Indeed, what makes the narrator able to profit from the story Armand tells him is, in fact, his class. The question becomes: what does Dumas’ reincarnation of the bootstrap myth otherwise allow him to say?\n\nAs I will demonstrate in this chapter, Dumas’ work produces a fictionalized figure of the ideal author as self-made man, now positioned against the familiar pairing of the reformed *courtisane* and her poetically-inclined lover. Narrative authority, Dumas suggests, depends more on initiative than position. But my chapter also makes a second argument, regarding the novel’s response to the threats posed by this new capitalist world order in which ambition is king. Dumas evinces, I show, that the dangers inherent in capitalism—the temptations of desire in all its\nmanifestations—can be controlled by reason and science. This stance is elaborated via the concept of the poisonous venal body—and either contact with, or similarity to, it.\n\nThroughout the novel, Dumas is obsessed by the notion of what Derrida might call the “trace”—the idea of presence in absence, and its relationship to social fears about the invisible and invidious nature of desire, contagion, and disease. Marguerite’s illness, for example, is fluid, contagious, liquid. Both in life and in death, she leaves a contaminating trace—blood, tears, ink, perfume—which lingers and endangers even after her departure. Dumas’ abiding problem is whether and by whom such traces can be contained. I explain that Dumas’ condemnation of the courisane is more emphatic than Balzac’s because, in his work, economic venality is overshadowed by venereal disease. I connect both the two lovers’ similarly contagious bodies (each oozing puss and pestilence), and their hysterical tears (the visible sign of their common emotional fragility), to liquid capital, which for Dumas includes not only possessions and land, but also books and other forms of intellectual property. I then evaluate the various practices of reading and writing depicted in the novel in order to understand what constitutes, for Dumas, an authority capable of containing such liquidity, and controlling its circulation. I conclude that the novel’s relationship to containment and circulation demonstrates how art both produces and is produced by a shift in ideological authority, in which the State/nobility are replaced by science and disinterested (i.e. undesiring) rational thought. The superior narrative control produced by Dumas’ novel relies on a certain scientific authority acting as a prophylactic against the circulation of mire into which an author must be willing to descend if he is to elevate himself within the literary industry.\n\nIn essence, my two central arguments in this chapter are about the relationship between capitalism, status, authorship, and literary art. The first is that Dumas embraces the capitalist idea\nthat social status should be a product of education and ambition, i.e. merit. Consequently, greatness, in writing as in other things, is neither inherent nor inherited. It is rather, the combined result of talent, drive and education. Great writers can be, and are, Dumas’ narrator suggests, self-made men. The second is that Dumas challenges Balzac’s complex critique of capitalist society by insisting that science and reason can contain capitalism’s excesses and keep its evils in check. Literature provides a template for this process. In his work, the great (male) writer wards off capitalism’s seductive—and feminized—dangers: his art is the proof of his success.\n\n**Structuring Containment**\n\nIn the largest, and arguably “central” portion of the book, Armand recounts the tale of his liaison with Marguerite as he convalesces from an illness brought on by the exhumation of her body. When he first met her, the popular Parisian *courtisane* was already dying of consumption. Touched by the young man’s concern for her, she gradually gives up her wealthy patrons and her life of pleasure in order to spend the summer with him in the countryside near Paris. However, at Armand’s father’s covert request, she leaves him, returning to her former life and thereby breaking her young lover’s heart. Wounded, Armand leaves to travel the Orient; Marguerite dies before his return.\n\nThis cathartic, confessional tale is bookended by two other first-person narratives: before it, the nameless frame-narrator’s account (which takes place chronologically *after* the central narrative) detailing how he came to be the recipient of Armand’s story. Following the young man’s tale, there is a collection of journal-style letters, written by Marguerite herself on her deathbed, explaining her break with Armand as the requisite sacrifice of their love for the sake of his future and that of his sister, whose impending marriage would be imperiled should the extent\nof Armand’s liaison with Marguerite become public knowledge. This courtisane’s tale is thus both contained within narrative, but also multiplied and disseminated by the very structures that appear to restrict its circulation. That this structure juxtaposes three different authoritative views, each with varying degrees of contact with the diseased woman, is significant. Who knows best: the nameless frame-narrator who hears the story after Marguerite’s death, the young man who lived with her for several months, or the courtisane herself?\n\nThe three narrators’ accounts converge, however, on two points. First, all three underline Marguerite’s exceptional nature: she differs from other women of her profession not only in the nobility of her sentiments, but also in her written expression of them. Having handed the frame narrator one of her letters to read, Armand remarks, “Qui croirait jamais que c’est une fille entretenue qui a écrit cela!” (46). And second, all three make a clear analogy between her venality—the life of pleasure that she pays for with her body—and her consistently incurable illness.4 The text as a whole seems to insist, on one hand, that Marguerite is not like the other venal women whose lives are the metaphoric expression of social disease. Yet, on the other hand, it simultaneously confirms the importance of distancing her contagious body from Armand and, ultimately, from his sister, who represents the proper bourgeois woman poised to marry respectably (and to dutifully reproduce).\n\nIn addition to reproducing bourgeois ideologies concerning women and the working class, the juxtaposition of the three narrators also sets up the possibility for the existence of an extra-diagetic writerly figure who appears somehow exceptional, even while firmly situated\n\n---\n\n4 Armand, for example, describes her former life of pleasure as symptoms of a physical illness and/or hysteria: “Cependant cette gaieté, cette façon de parler et de boire, qui me paraissaient chez les autres convives les résultats de la débauche, de l’habitude ou de la force, me semblaient chez Marguerite un besoin d’oublier, une fièvre, une irritabilité nerveuse…” (92).\nwithin the limits of a system based on the notion of contagion: one in which contact is both necessary and sufficient for the spread of disease.\n\n**Liquid bodies, liquid cash and an outpouring of words**\n\nThe containing structure of the narrative is repeated in how the text itself responds to the threats arising from contact with—and, as an effect, similarity to—a venal body. The relationship between immorality, contagion and the bodily fluids that circulate in this novel of prostitution is key. As Bernadette Lintz adroitly demonstrates in her article “Concocting *La Dame aux camélias*: Blood, tears and other fluids,” the novel’s depiction of Marguerite’s menstrual discharge, tuberculosis-induced sputum, and decomposing corpse as well as Armand’s tears, calls readily on the mid-century’s interpellated medical and religious discourses. While agreeing with Lintz’ analysis of Marguerite’s “liquid” body as the site of punishment for the courtisane’s denial of maternity, and of Armand’s tears as a redemptive blood-letting that flushes his system of his lover’s disease, it is nonetheless important to emphasize the extent to which these fluids are connected to anxieties about how the circulation of capital was undermining the stability of class hierarchies in the period leading up to the 1848 revolution.\n\nIt is unknown whether Dumas fils himself read the entirety of Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s 1836 *De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris*, but he surely read his father’s 1843 essay on Parisian prostitution, in which Parent is cited. The son’s treatment of Marguerite Gautier as a vessel of infectious fluids—as liquid waste—is typical of the analogy between...\n\n---\n\nprostitutes and sewers present in Parent’s study and propagated by the majority of writers of the time. \n\nDumas père’s summary emphasizes this connection in particular.\n\nIn the very first representation of Marguerite by the frame narrator, before she even has a name or a body, she is depicted as analogous to sewage by virtue of her venality. The narrator calls her apartment—easily identifiable as one belonging to “une femme entretenue” (18)—a “cloaque splendide” (22). Cloaque is defined in the *Trésor de la langue française* thus: “Endroit prévu pour servir de réceptacle aux eaux sales et aux immondices.” (Additionally, cloaque and immondices were both terms emphasized in Dumas père’s study.) These definitions not only underline the liquid nature of the luxurious apartment’s former resident (“eaux sales”), but also remind the reader of her low-class origins: “immondices” suggests the filth of the streets, that foul mud which the courtisane’s carriage splattered upon the carriages of the envious “femmes du monde” (18).\n\nYet a reference to sewers is not entirely negative. Like the Parisian sewers, whose function was viewed as sanitary—even if their contents were potentially lethal—the “cloaque” itself is rendered harmless, supposedly, by the sacrificial death of the courtisane: “les femmes les plus vertueuses pouvaient […] pénétrer jusque dans sa chambre” (22) because the “immondice”—the kept woman it used to house—is supposedly no longer present: “Celle chez qui je me trouvais était morte […]. La mort avait purifié l’air de ce cloaque splendide” (ibid).\n\n---\n\n6 Parent-Duchâtelet’s own process was, in fact, similarly text-based: he spent years delving into previously-ignored archives of the prefecture de Police, including those of the Bureau de Moeurs, where he read the dossiers containing the officers’ accounts of their interactions with individual prostitutes and brothel madams. Such archival material would later take on its own literary value, as demonstrated by the 1863 publication (by slang dictionary editor Loredan Larchey, no less) of the police records of prostitution between 1759 and 1774, a fact recorded in the 2009 publication by historian Gabrielle Houbre, *Le Livre des courtisanes, archives secrètes de la police des moeurs*, a book that, today, circulates similarly on its capital as both documentary and voyeuristic entertainment. It is the archive, and not the kind of “cloaque immonde,” that Parent-Duchâtelet first imagined; indeed, the sources he credits for the large majority of his book, which includes chapters on “Moeurs et habitudes des prostituées” and “Conditions diverses des prostituées,” are largely textual. He mostly reports compiled data, gathered by others, which he then uses to support his claims.\ntheir disappointment, perhaps, but in the greater interest of their moral health, a.k.a. their propriety, the noble ladies who entered as potential buyers of the dead courtisane’s possessions were effectively shielded from the sight of venal sex: “ces dames ne suprirent que ce qui était à vendre depuis le décès, et rien de ce qui se vendait du vivant de la locataire” (22).\n\nIndeed, the narrator purports, even the objects in the cabinet de toilette—the room where the sexualized body would have been the most exposed—retain no trace of their venal origin. Their utility having been negated by the death of their user, only their exchange value remains: “C’était là une magnifique collection, et pas un de ces mille objets, si nécessaires à la toilette d’une femme comme celle chez qui nous étions, n’était en autre metal qu’or ou argent” (22-23).\n\nThus, the only remnants of the courtisane that the proper ladies are exposed to in the heart of the cloaque are monetary. This recalls the phrase pecunia non olet.\\(^7\\) The object of their desire—despite its origin in a cloaque—is, itself, clean, free of any risk of contamination. And, by association, these women’s desires as consumers do not risk troubling the social order.\n\nThe sanitation of the cloaque is thus dependent not only on the courtisane’s death, but also on maintaining a clear distinction between the desire that brought them there from that of the frame narrator’s. He notes that it was the curious women visiting the apartment sought in vain “au milieu de toutes ces merveilles, les traces de cette vie de courtisane dont on leur avait fait, sans doute, de si étranges récits” (22). The bourgeois value system that trained women to stay out of potentially embarrassing locations keeps them from satisfying a more voyeuristic desire for “traces”. Meanwhile, the narrator—unbound by the same rules of gender-based\n\n\\(^7\\) This phrase, roughly translated to mean “money does not stink,” evokes the urine tax imposed by the Roman emperor Vespasian. It implies that the value of money is indifferent to the source of one’s wealth, a concept vital to the new members of the elite bourgeoisie whose wealth was the product of labor, and not inherited. For more on the shift in the meaning of money—handling it, making it, spending it—from inherently immoral to moral over the course of the nineteenth-century, see Victoria Thompson, *The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870*, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.\nshame—is able to read between the lines, or rather, the initials, engraved on the objects: “Moi qui ne m’effarouchais pas à la vue du cabinet de toilette d’une femme entretenue, je m’amusais à en examiner les détails […] et je m’aperçus que tous ces ustensiles magnifiquement ciselés portaient des initiales variées et des couronnes différentes” (23). This plurality of “masculine” initials on a wealthy woman’s possessions suffices to represent to the narrator “une prostitution de la pauvre fille” (23).\n\nThus, the narrator is only partly right when he says that the tangible “traces” of the truth behind the “étranges récits” the courtisane’s narrative are not to be found in the apartment. Indeed, the letters constituting the written trace of her life, had been evacuated from the apartment before the sale, and were thus unavailable to those present as consumers. We will learn, however, upon arriving at the end of the novel, that these traces had actually ended up in the possession of the narrator, and were the sole guarantor of the novel’s authority and interest. This, thus, falsifies the narrator’s claim that “les mystères étaient morts avec la déesse.” On the first page, the frame narrator had taken on the “mystère” of the courtisane in the vague explanation of his authority: “Par une circonstance particulière, seul je pouvais les [des faits] écrire, car seul j’ai été le confident des derniers détails sans lesquels il eût été impossible de faire un récit intéressant et complet” (17). It is the commutable property of the courtisane’s life story that puts it in the hands of the narrator. And this story will inevitably bring him a certain sum of money that, like the precious objects in the courtisane’s dressing room, will not smell of the cloaque in which the story was first written. So not only does the odor of the sewer, connected to the woman herself, not stick to the courtisane’s artifacts, but even their aura—narratives about her venality, accounts of her allure; that which would make her body a mystère, or the perversion thereof—evaporates off her possessions following her death.\nAt the same time, there is an undercurrent in this *cloaque*: the narrator is practically swept into the “cabinet de toilette,” where he finds items of gold and silver that, unlike her enviable furniture, clearly identify—to the narrator, anyway—the apartment’s former resident as a *courtisane*. The next time the narrator presents Marguerite, she is once again associated with liquid bodily waste, but it is menstrual blood rather than excrement that stands metonymically for the saleable state of her body. He describes how the *dame aux camélias* used her signature flowers to communicate her sexual availability, carrying white or red camellias in accordance—the reader must only assume⁸—with her menstrual cycle, a clearer discussion of which would constitute a grave social taboo. But it is the venal aspect of this “signature” which, as Lintz argues, is most offensive:\n\nMore than just committing gender and social improprieties, what the text suggests about Marguerite’s behavior is that it symbolically denaturalizes and desacralizes the most valued female biological function, that of reproduction, by tying it to commercial considerations and subordinating it to economic interests such as the use of sex to make a living rather than to produce life. (289)\n\nHer monthly menses—signified by her flowers—are in this sense wasted, and therefore both waste and waste product.⁹\n\nIf her flowers suggest an *odor di femina*, after the *courtisane*’s death this “aroma” has come to signify her shame, as is blatantly evident in the frame narrator’s final description of her lifeless corpse. He accompanies Armand to the cemetery where Marguerite is to be exhumed under the premise of moving her grave to a newer section. Once again, she is equated with liquid\n\n---\n\n⁸ The narrator feigns ignorance in the face of this sign, as I discuss further below.\n\nwaste, with miasma: “La bière était en chêne, et ils [les fossoyeurs] se mirent à dévisser la paroi supérieure qui faisait couvercle. L’humidité de la terre avait rouillé les vis et ce ne fut pas sans efforts que la bière s’ouvrit. Une odeur infecte s’en exhala, malgré les plantes aromatiques dont elle était semée” (61). Opening the coffin constitutes an act against nature, the forces of which (the oak, the rust and the aromatic plants) would have kept the courtisane’s unsightly and malodorous decayed body hidden, like the first major underground sewer system constructed between 1805 and 1812. Once opened, the “odeur infecte” of the courtisane’s body is exposed, immediately making both Armand and the narrator physically ill (62-63).\n\nThe harm of exposing the corpse to the air recalls a result from Parent-Duchâtelet’s work on liquid and solid waste (Hygiène publique [1836]), performed concurrently with his investigations into prostitution in Paris. Parent usually concluded that waste products, while stinky and offensive, were generally harmless and sometimes even beneficial. But, writes Charles Bernheimer, Parent “had to acknowledge that there were circumstances in which organic corruption could be dangerous”: poudrette, dried fecal matter useful as fertilizer, was proven to cause illness and even death when it was exposed to water and air and allowed to ferment (13). This led Parent-Duchâtelet to recommend “rigorous exclusion and containment,” (13), a strategy that would echo in his report on prostitution. While Marguerite may have been exceptionally beautiful in life, in death she belongs to the small category of dangerous, even lethal, types of waste matter. Armand’s death-like reaction supports this: “[Il] ne bougeait pas […] ; il était pâle comme le cadavre que nous venions de voir” (63). The narrator, while disgusted, takes on the role of a doctor who, for having dissected the dead, is all the better able to treat the living. As we shall see in the following section, the ideal author will thus take extreme care to successfully contain the body of the courtisane, even in a novel touting her redemption. In this way, the\nwriter’s scientific acumen reigns in capitalism’s underbelly, rescuing the social body from the dangers of corruption and disease.\n\nThe book’s frame narrator, in spite of his stated “indulgence inépuisable pour les courtisanes” (26) thus appears unconvinced of Marguerite’s harmlessness, or opposed more broadly to those who believed that venal women could be redeemed. Perhaps Dumas’ hero’s narration will prove able to remove her from the sewers. Will Armand’s account be less tarnished, since he re-imagines Marguerite through his account of falling in love with her? Not entirely: his portrayal of her reveals that Marguerite’s sexual availability makes her similar to, if not yet, liquid waste. The metaphor he uses compares her to a bottle of exotic perfume:\n\n> On voyait qu’elle en était encore à la virginité du vice. Sa marche assurée, sa taille souple, ses narines roses et ouvertes, ses grands yeux légèrement cerclés de bleu, dénotait une de ces natures ardentes qui répandent autour d’elles un parfum de volupté, comme ces flacons d’Orient qui, si bien fermés qu’ils soient, laissent échapper le parfum de la liqueur qu’ils renferment. (88)\n\nThis pleasant odor both contradicts and recalls the odor escaping from the closed coffin. Furthermore, while the *flacon* may remain closed, this body is presented as porous: her nose, eyes, and waist (perhaps a synecdoche for what lies below) exude her ardent, intoxicating nature, and permit, if not invite, penetration. She is othered and exoticized by affiliation with the Orient, even though she comes from only as far as the rural French countryside, both tropes that equate her perfume-bottle body with prostitution.\\(^\\text{10}\\)\n\n\\(^{10}\\) The parallel between Marguerite’s body and the Orient is furthered by Armand’s use of language evoking a military conquest to describe his courtship. For example, « J’étais trop avancé pour reculer, et d’ailleurs cette fille me bouleversait. Ce mélange de gaieté, de tristesse, de candeur, de prostitution, cette maladie même qui devait développer chez elle la sensibilité des impressions comme l’irritabilité des nerfs, tout me faisait comprendre que si, dès la première fois, je ne prenais pas *d’empire* sur cette nature oubliée et légère, elle était perdue pour moi. » (98, emphasis added)\nIn Armand’s account we do not find the frame narrator’s negation of her ability to leave a trace. Her liquid nature is in fact connected to what makes her presence readable, even in her absence, since it leaves evidence of her all-too-physical contact with her surroundings. While alive, her presence-as-absence is well-established in terms of her interaction with textiles: her artful use of her clothing to distract from her insufficiently feminine shape\\(^{11}\\) corresponds to the traces she leaves in the folds of Armand’s pillow after she has quit his bed.\\(^{12}\\) But in addition to the imprint of her absent body on bedclothes and dress, Marguerite’s body also leaves a trace on the textual.\n\nWhen Armand returns to their summer residence in the town of Bougival, just outside Paris, he finds Marguerite absent but he encounters the book he had given her: “\\textit{Manon Lescaut} était ouvert sur la table. Il me sembla que d’endroits en endroits les pages étaient mouillées comme par des larmes” (198). Tear stains bear witness to her presence as a sentimental, empathetic reader of \\textit{Manon Lescaut}. While these tears suggested at first her difference from Manon—Marguerite had previously remarked upon reading Prévost’ book that “lorsqu’une femme aime, elle ne peut pas faire ce que faisait Manon” (166)—upon consideration of the narrator’s presentation of Manon, it becomes clear that, in the context of Dumas’ rewriting of Prévost, Marguerite’s tears only bring her more in harmony with her eighteenth-century sister.\\(^{13}\\)\n\n\\(^{11}\\) “Grande et mince jusqu’à l’exagération, elle possédait au suprême degré l’art de faire disparaître cet oubli de la nature par le simple arrangement des choses qu’elle revêtait. […] L’épais manchon […] qu’elle appuyait contre sa poitrine, était entouré de plis si habilement ménagés, que l’œil n’avait rien à redire, si exigeant qu’il fût, au contour des lignes” (28).\n\n\\(^{12}\\) “Quand elle fut partie, je fus épouvanté de la solitude dans laquelle elle me laissait. Deux heures après son départ, j’étais encore assis sur le lit qu’elle venait de quitter, regardant l’oreiller qui gardait les plis de sa forme…” (222).\n\n\\(^{13}\\) The initial difference between Manon and Marguerite is established by Marguerite’s [By Manon’s??] dryness: her heart is assumed to be a vast, arid desert while Manon’s body is potentially productive after her death, watered as it is by her lover’s tears: “Manon était morte dans un désert, il est vrai, mais dans les bras de l’homme qui l’aimait avec toutes les énergies de l’âme, qui, morte, lui creusa une fosse, l’arrosoa de ses larmes et y ensevelit son cœur ; tandis que Marguerite, […] était morte au sein d’un luxe somptueux, […] mais aussi dans \\textit{un désert du cœur, bien plus aride}, bien plus vaste, bien plus impitoyable que celui dans lequel avait été enterrée Manon.” (37, emphasis\nThe only instance in Prévost’s novel when Manon’s words are not reported indirectly is in the letter she leaves for Des Grieux upon departing from the country house they had been inhabiting: Manon tells her lover that she has left in order to “work” for money—or rather, to entrap a wealthy dupe—to support them (Prévost 71). When Marguerite leaves Armand for the comte de N…., departing in secret from their shared house in the country, the copy of Manon Lescaut takes the place of Manon’s letter. The letter that Marguerite writes to Armand when she takes off for Paris confirms, for its reader, only that she intends to resume her venal life: Armand does not comprehend the reference to his sister that would have rendered Marguerite’s absence, and her tears, the sign of a redemptive sacrifice. Thus, far from washing the modern courtisane clean of her venality, the tears she sheds on the account of Manon’s plight only serve to further draw attention to her body’s excessive presence.\n\nBecause Armand’s attraction to her cannot be divorced from the ways in which illness has rendered her body vulnerable, Marguerite’s ailment brings threateningly uncontrollable bodily fluids into play:14 “Vers la fin du souper, Marguerite fut prise d’un accès de toux plus fort que tous ceux qu’elle avait eus depuis que j’étais là. Il me sembla que sa poitrine se déchirait intérieurement. La pauvre fille devint pourpre, ferma les yeux sous la douleur et porta à ses lèvres sa serviette qu’une goutte de sang rougit.” (93) Her body is again an imperfect container, coming apart from the inside, and breaking down even before she is buried, as suggested by her unnatural discoloration. Here, the trace she leaves, the drop of blood staining her napkin, is again the sign of a body that is both socially unacceptable and diseased. While it is not the menstrual\n\n---\n\n14 For a detailed discussion of the scientific community’s equation of female bodily fluids—and those of the prostitute in particular—with sexually transmitted diseases, see Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse, New York U. P., 1997.\nblood implied by her flowers, it is the sign of an illness that has been socially coded as synonymous with a venal lifestyle. Thus, Armand, far from redeeming Marguerite from the discourses of contagion that condemn her, repeats them in his account of her, even as he emphasizes her elevated nature.\n\nFinally, even in Marguerite’s own words, there is an equation between the fluids escaping her body due to her illness and the money she receives as a courtisane. When Armand first admits his love for her, she turns him away saying, “vous aurez une triste maîtresse ; une femme nerveuse, malade, triste, ou gaie d’une gaieté plus triste que le chagrin, une femme qui crache le sang et qui dépense cent mille francs par an” (96). Tears, blood and money all flow uncontrollably from this body. The parallel construction between coughing up blood and spending a hundred thousand francs makes them both symptoms of her illness. It is thus unquestionable, in the narrator’s and even in the courtisane’s own view, that the best way to avoid inevitable contagion—and the resultant loss of one’s own tears and money—is to avoid contact with her.\n\nBut Armand Duval, it seems, simply cannot do this. As a result, his body also takes on—or so it seems at first—a liquidity of its own that proves equally unhealthy. In Armand’s description of his encounter with Marguerite at the Théâtre de Variétés, the beauty of a woman he had once found attractive but had not pursued strikes him. This time, however, she’s slightly different: “Elle a été malade” (67); and she has not been cured. His newly revived attraction for her is experienced as the sudden onset of an illness: “Sans que je susse pourquoi, je devenais pâle et mon coeur battait violemment. J’ai un de mes amis qui s’occupe de sciences occultes, et qui appellerait ce que j’éprouvais l’affinité des fluides ; moi, je crois tout simplement que j’étais destiné à devenir amoureux de Marguerite, et que je le pressentais” (67). The friend’s diagnosis,\n“l’affinité des fluides” describes both Armand’s own imbalanced body as well as his attraction to Marguerite whose allure as a courtisane is inextricably connected to her infectious bodily fluids.\\footnote{Yet this eighteenth-century explanation is outdated, Armand says: a product of “sciences occults.” He replaces this explanation with his own: destiny. This conflation of feminine allure with illness, Lintz argues, is Dumas’ way of highlighting an equally outdated “romanticized cultural construction of consumption” (Lintz 302).}\n\nArmand’s body is thus as much of a carrier of disease as Marguerite’s. At first, it seems to be as a result of his contact with her. In addition to the feverish lifestyle he adopts (during which he bleeds money), the most visible symptom of his love-sickness is his uncontrollable, hysterical crying. This is present from the beginning of the book. From the moment he meets the frame narrator, he is almost always in tears: “M. Duval, fortement ému, ne fit aucun effort pour cacher son émotion, et ce fut des larmes dans les yeux et un tremblement dans la voix qu’il me [parla]” (41). This excessive emotion is equated with illness, just as Marguerite’s venality is. The frame narrator describes Armand crying again, referring to him as “[le] malade”: “Deux grosses larmes roulèrent sur les joues du malade qui détourna la tête pour me les cacher” (57).\n\nFeverishness brought on by a renewed contact with the courtisane’s body is likewise expressed as a liquid: “Un peu avant la tombe, Armand s’arrêta pour essuyer son visage qu’inondaient de grosses gouttes de sueur” (60).\n\nHowever, I would like to propose that Armand’s vulnerability to contagion, his permeability so to speak, is a preexisting condition: a trait implicit in a character who performs the role of young romantic hero, a kind of hero who has become passé in 1837. Anxiety that this man’s emotional frailty may make him similar to a woman like Marguerite is expressed in Armand’s concern that his tears make him appear less than masculine: “Laissez-moi rester quelques minutes encore, le temps de m’essuyer les yeux, pour que les badauds de la rue ne regardent pas comme une curiosité ce grand garçon qui pleure” (48). He infantilizes himself,\ncalling himself a “garçon,” which enacts the Rousseauian trope of the young hero in search of a mother figure. But he goes farther, saying that crying just isn’t masculine: even a boy who cries would be viewed as a “curiosité.”\n\nThis word, “curiosité,” puts both his gender and his autonomy in question. If the porous, “flacon”-esque state of Marguerite’s exoticized body was a sign of her venality, her femininity further demonized by the way that she flaunts her avoidance of reproduction, repudiating the social mandate towards maternity, then Armand’s liquid eyes risk making him not only less than a man, but may also position him on the feminine side of a venal equation: he becomes “une curiosité,” an object that can be consumed by an othering gaze. It was the frame narrator’s initial identification as an “amateur de curiosités” that had lead him in to Marguerite’s apartment, if not to buy, than at least to look (18). In spite of being the narrator of his story, Armand—emotional, diseased, feminized, objectified—suddenly appears inferior in both power and wealth to the frame narrator. Of course the latter ended up as a buyer at the auction of Marguerite’s things, which is what then allowed him to make the gift of the book to Armand that resulted in their relationship, granted him access to Armand’s apartment, and resulted in the hero’s reciprocal gift of narrative.\n\nBut even the frame narrator is uneasy that the source of his story is the mutual exchange of gifts, and not of payment for the satisfaction of his desire to know, his desire for narrative. He states, “Je m’intéressais malgré moi à ce jeune homme. Peut-être dans cet intérêt y avait-il de l’égoïsme ; peut-être avais-je entrevu sous cette douleur une touchante histoire de cœur, peut-être enfin mon désir de la connaître était-il pour beaucoup dans le souci que je prenais du silence d’Armand” (51) The narrator’s uncontrollable interest in Armand reframes the sexual desire that leads a client to a prostitute: a selfish desire for romance, however fictional, and for\n“knowledge.” Armand’s illness and tears constitute signs of venality—and the saleable state of his narrative—because they indicate a body that is not only less than masculine, but in a more precarious economic position.\n\nIt could be argued that Armand’s tears are a melancholic symptom in a realist context that emphasizes the importance of the visual. They are certainly symptoms of a body out of control—and out of control of its own discourse, of the signs it lets circulate. Since her death took place during his absence, Armand was unable to see Marguerite’s body, and is therefore unable to control his repeated expression of loss, since he is unable to come to terms with what exactly he lost in her death.16 Once he sees the exhumed body, his tears cease. Lintz proposes that this drying up is a sign of healing: “His previously profuse tears, which had earned him the ‘vive sympathie’ [47] and unqualified moral support of his male companion, dry up in the process of his cathartic healing and give way to a flow of words as he starts spinning the tale of his relationship with the dead courtesan” (293). And indeed, the talking cure does seem to have a beneficial effect on him, or at least the narrator wants to believe so at the novel’s conclusion: “Armand, toujours triste, mais soulagé un peu par le récit de cette histoire se rétablit vite” (246). But does the act of narration bring Armand into control of his body? Of his words?\n\nI disagree with the notion that narration, for Armand, functions solely as a sign of healing in the overall structure of the novel. Rather, his outpouring of narrative, almost a logorrhea, also replaces his tears and serves as another expression of the same symptom, one equally liquid in nature. It is a symptom that will be siphoned out of him by the curious frame narrator who admits himself into Armand’s apartment under the sign of desiring Armand’s return to health, in\n\n16 Armand’s “affinité des fluides” returns as a thirst that represents his desire to see, which is once again portrayed as a symptom of the illness he caught from Marguerite: “Je vous jure que je ne puis être calme que lorsque j’aurai vu Marguerite. C’est peut-être une soif de la fièvre qui me brûle, un rêve de mes insomnies, un résultat de mon délire...” (58).\na manner analogous to the doctors whose blood-letting weakens Marguerite as she writes her version of the story. Like a doctor, the narrator claims that he seeks to cure Armand’s illness. Yet his actions more closely resemble those of Armand himself, who had said that he wished to cure Marguerite, even as he became her lover, an act that, rather than curing, only briefly postponed her inevitable death.\n\nIt must be noted that his tears did not begin with Marguerite’s death. If Armand is, by nature, as incurable as Marguerite, and was so before his contact with Marguerite, what is his illness? If his tears are in fact related to loss, it is not only melancholic loss but also loss of an excessively embodied, but exclusively masculine, nature. The first time—chronologically—that Armand sheds tears is on the first occasion of entering in to Marguerite’s bedroom, to where she had retreated following a severe coughing fit at the end of a small dinner party. His interest in Marguerite had begun two years prior to the encounter in her apartment, and is therefore sufficiently piqued, so to speak.\n\nThe sexual nature of the couple’s first bedroom scene, theatrical in its presentation to the reader, is hardly disguised by the expression of his wish for her friendship or for a familial relationship. Armand begins:\n\n—Vous vous tuez, madame, lui dis-je alors d’une voix émue ; je voudrais être votre ami, votre parent, pour vous empêcher de vous faire mal ainsi.\n\n—Ah ! cela ne vaut vraiment la peine […] Après quoi elle se leva et, prenant la bougie, elle la mit sur la cheminée et se regarda dans la glace. « Comme je suis pâle ! dit-elle en rattachant sa robe et en passant ses doigts sur ses cheveux déliés. (94) \n\nThe mirror, her own comment on her pallor, and her hands smoothing her untidy dress and hair both hides and doubles Armand’s desiring, erotic gaze on her diseased body. When he does not\nstand up to follow her when she moves to leave the bedroom, Marguerite, he says, “comprit l’émotion que cette scène m’avait causée” (ibid). Watching the tragically ill Marguerite in the candlelight, a theatrical setting that echoes the one Dumas’ reader is currently in, has clearly given Armand an erection.\n\nThe conclusion of the scene confirms this: following her consumptive fit, Marguerite has slipped back into her role of courtisane, which the mirror connotes. As such, the “émotion” that she would understand, and read easily, is male desire. The offer of her hand, and even her imperative, “venez” can be read at two levels: sentimental and erotic. When she tries to leave the room a second time, Armand keeps her there again, physically restraining her: “Je pris sa main, je la portai à mes lèvres en la mouillant malgré moi de deux larmes longtemps contenues.” The tears that escape, “malgré [lui],” and her response make this bedroom scene one of a youth’s initial visit to a brothel: “Eh bien, mais êtes-vous enfant ! dit-elle en se rasseyant auprès de moi.” Her use of the term “enfant” does not quite yet fit as an endearment, but seems like a criticism.\n\nAs Jean-Marie Goulemot has shown in *Ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main* (1997), the sentimental novel and the erotic novel are two sides of the same tapestry. Both genres can be identified by the text’s pursuit of an emotional and physical release, either of tears or of semen, respectively. In a novel such as Dumas’, in which the hero mocks—only to then enact—the performance of the sentimental novel’s version of love, and whose imagined (male) reader would have been familiar not only with *Manon Lescaut* but also, most likely, her less literary contemporaries, such a scene would arguably inspire a snicker or two at Armand’s youthful inability to keep his “tears” from soaking the courtisane’s hand.\n\n---\n\n17 Armand compares his love-struck shyness in the presence of Marguerite to his mistress’ hopeless love for him: “A cette époque, j’avais pour maîtresse une petite bourgeoise fort tendre et fort sentimentale, dont le sentiment et les lettres mélancoliques me faisaient rire. Je compris le mal que j’avais dû lui faire par celui que j’espère” (71).\nThe widening of the gap between masculinity and femininity in the defining of gender difference during the July Monarchy witnessed the fall of the Romantic hero as he gradually ceded to a less emotive, more laconic figure of masculinity. Armand’s permeable body is ambiguous: does it figure as part of Dumas’ critique of the “romanticized cultural conception of consumption” (Lintz 302)? Or does it figure in the tradition of the libertine genre, to which both Prévost and Dumas each strongly argue (perhaps too strongly?) that his does not belong?\n\nIf we return to the frame narrative, keeping in mind the double-entendre of tears-as-semen, it becomes significant that most of the occasions on which Armand cries follow physical contact with an item metonymically replacing Marguerite. First, when presented with the copy of Manon Lescaut that the frame narrator purchased at the auction, and that—we learn—Armand had given to Marguerite, Armand strokes the book and sheds a tear, leaving a trace of his body on its pages: “‘C’est bien cela, fit-il en regardant la dédicace de la première page et en feuilletant, c’est bien cela.’ Et deux grosses larmes tombèrent sur les pages” (43). Next, he shows Marguerite’s letter to the narrator, “Et tout ému de ses souvenirs, il considéra quelque temps l’écriture de cette lettre qu’il finit par porter à ses lèvres” (46). The word “émou” suggests his tears again, at the site of contact with writing that replaces the courtisane’s body.\n\nThis fetishistic metonymy is confirmed by his expression, “Oh ! je donnerais dix ans de ma vie pour pleurer une heure à ses pieds” (47). He would exchange an early death (if by death, he means a petite mort, he seems to have a recurring problem with this…) for contact with the part of her body that will obligingly peek out, a few pages later, from under the worm-eaten shroud (62). Upon seeing the decayed face, he accordingly inserts into his mouth a textile representative of both the shroud and Marguerite’s previously “textual” body (the book and the\n\n18 For a thorough analysis of these seemingly contradictory forms of masculinity, see Margaret Waller’s excellent study, The Male Malady.\nletter): “Armand, sans pouvoir détourner son regard de cette figure, avait porté son mouchoir à sa\nbouche et le mordait” (62). This oral gesture acts as a perversion avant la lettre of the conflation\nof eyes and mouth, of contagion and sex, via contact with a handkerchief in the above-cited\nbedroom scene, already in Armand’s memory (occurring, as it does, later in the book, but earlier\nin the chronology).\n\nIn this context, then, the cessation of Armand’s tears does not mark the beginning of his\ncure, but rather points to a displaced impotence: his bodily fluids have shown that he, like\nMarguerite, is overly embodied, and as such, he is feminized; despite his male sex, he is less than\nmasculine. His outpouring of discourse is a symptom of his own unregulated sexuality. The\nembodied—that is, spoken—narration of his affair to the frame narrator codes as a substitute for\nthe impossible (or at least taboo) desire for sexual union with Marguerite’s dead body.\n\nMoreover, if his words are metonymic with the trace of his bodily fluids, Armand does\nindeed occupy the same feminine position in respect to the frame narrator that Marguerite had\nwith Armand, as suggested above. The relationship between the impotent Armand and the man\nwho will publish his story is uncomfortably analogous to the Romantic lover and his almost-\nexceptional courtisane. At first, it is the book itself that is like a courtisane, the value of its\ncapacity to satisfy a certain desire escalated by purely superficial means: « Pourquoi ? Je n’en\nsais rien. Sans doute pour ce quelque chose d’écrit. […] Je dus donner beaucoup à penser aux\ngens qui, témoins de cette scène, se demandèrent sans doute dans quel but j’étais venu payer cent\nfrancs un livre que je pouvais avoir partout pour dix ou quinze francs au plus » (36). The second\ntaboo that surfaces when the object of desire shifts from the luxury edition of Manon Lescaut to\nthe story of Armand himself, is the taboo regarding male homosexuality within the homosocial\nclimate of literary salons that sought to exclude women. When speaking to Armand, the frame\nnarrator denies his desire to know the story behind « ce quelque chose d’écrit », lying about why he wanted the volume (he says it was to anger another bidder). Then, he offers it as a gift to his interlocuter, but it is a gift that imposes reciprocity: « … ce livre est à votre disposition et je vous prie de l’accepter […] pour qu’il soit entre nous l’engagement d’une connaissance plus longue et de relations plus intimes » (44). Armand’s contagious body, then, contains—or fails to contain—the object of the frame narrator’s desire.\n\nIn the framework of the book’s desire to produce an image of the new ideal author, one capable of producing himself via ambition, talent and education, the central couple’s analogous fluids—tears, symptoms of illness, and sexual secretions—paint both Marguerite and Armand as equally embodied, equally venal, and equally feminine—and thus ensures their parallel incapacity to write. The ideal (male) author, Dumas suggests, must be capable of controlling the seductive and contagious forces of the capitalist world.\n\n**Writing the body: the courisane as anti-author**\n\nIt may be part of her exceptional status that Marguerite writes at all. Performing the trope of the poor country girl, abused by her mother and driven to prostitution in the city at an early age, she tells Armand, “Je suis une pauvre fille de la campagne, et je ne savais pas écrire mon nom il y a six ans” (131). The instances where Marguerite is inscribed far outnumber the times in the novel where she writes (for) herself. And indeed, her initial letters to Armand are short, \n\n---\n\n19 Before the narrative in which she is alive begins, Marguerite’s absence is affirmed by a series of inscriptions: the printed poster that the frame narrator reads in the street (18); the first physical description of her is actually a description of a portrait of her (29); her affair with the duc then appears in the frame narrative as one of several stock stories about nameless prostitutes (30-33); her name is inscribed by hand in the novel *Manon Lescaut* (36), an inscription that echoes in the appearance of her name in the cemetery registry (52); the description of the portrait is similarly doubled by the death portrait in which all her features are described by their absence, and yet she remains recognizable (62).\nexisting merely to arrange for face-to-face interaction. They are not the type of letters written to be kept, composed with an eye to posterity, which was typical of women’s correspondence at the time. They are also noticeably lacking in the poetic style that characterizes her later, “journaling” correspondence, which are the only letters that achieve a wider circulation, passing from Marguerite to Julie to Armand to the narrator and finally, to the reader.\n\nWhen she does write at slightly greater length, her words—a mixture of truth and fiction—fail to communicate the genuine sentiment that would distinguish her from other courtisanes and render her the equal of a bourgeois woman: instead her writing translates only her venality. When she writes to Armand to keep him from coming over while she is with the duc, she uses illness to cover/code for her prostituted state and her avowal of love is dismissed as a lie analogous to her doctor’s orders to rest. Armand says, “Mon premier mot fut: « Elle me trompe ! »” (132). He ignores the rest. Moreover, it appears that she is aware of her writing’s failure to represent her accurately, since she avoids most written exchanges with Armand, appearing instead in person to respond to both of his incendiary letters (145, 218). And once she abandons the business of being a courtisane, and her writing is required to replace the sale of her body, her letters circulate only in secret, only between women. Her exchanges with Prudence about the sale of her possessions from Bougival are locked away, unreadable to Armand and therefore to us (171).\n\nIn one way, Marguerite’s contact with the volume of Manon Lescaut given to her by Armand sets her up as a writer by positioning her in parallel to the author of the book bearing her\n\n---\n\n20 She writes the minimum, using incomplete sentences: “Voici mes ordres: Ce soir au Vaudeville. Venez pendant le troisième entr’acte” (120).\n21 Marguerite’s letter reads, “Cher enfant, je suis un peu souffrante, et le médecin m’ordonne le repos. Je me coucherai de bonne heure ce soir et ne vous verrai pas. Mais, pour vous récompenser, je vous attendrai demain à midi. Je vous aime.” (132)\nname: *La Dame aux camélias* was written as a re-reading of this eighteenth-century novel through the lens of Dumas’ life and times.\\(^2\\) Armand says, “Ce fut pendant ce temps-là,” their summer at Bougival, after she leaves the duc for him, “qu’elle lut si souvent *Manon Lescaut*. Je la surpris bien des fois annotant ce livre : et elle me disait toujours que lorsqu’une femme aime, elle ne peut pas faire ce que faisait Manon” (166). Her annotation leaves a trace on the pages of the volume in her hand, and her critique of Manon summarizes what Dumas sought to illustrate with Marguerite. However this authorial stance is undone by the excessive presence of her body, mentioned above: “*Manon Lescaut* était ouvert sur la table. Il me sembla que d’endroits en endroits les pages étaient mouillées comme par des larmes” (198). The courtisane’s fluid body is once again readable, signifying her excess of emotion and functioning as the trace of her absence.\n\nWhile there are scenes of all three narrators’ writing processes, Marguerite is the character for whom the act of writing is most in conflict with the body. In the first letter from her that Armand shows the narrator, she lacks both the (masculine) strength and (seminal?) blood/ink to write at length:\n\n“pardonnez-moi, mon ami, si je ne vous en écris pas plus long, mais ceux qui disent qu’ils me guériront m’épuisent de saignées, et ma main se refuse à écrire davantage.\n\n‘Marguerite Gautier’\n\nEn effet, les derniers mots étaient à peine lisibles.” (46)\n\nThe blood that would leave the trace of her illness on her napkin is unable to leave a stable trace of her name, her identity as an individual. That her signature is rendered almost unreadable by\n\n---\n\n\\(^2\\) See Eliane Lecarme-Tabone’s concise study of *Manon Lescaut* as a hypotext and palimpsest for *La Dame aux camélias* (*Romantisme* 72.II, 1992).\nthe blood-letting prescribed by her doctors is remedied only by the frame narrator who publishes\nArmand’s story and by the resulting book’s typesetters.\n\nIn her letters, compiled at the end of the volume, there is a second mention that the act of\nwriting exacerbates her illness: “Le médecin a ordonné qu’on ne me laissât pas toucher une\nplume. Julie Duprat, qui me veille, me permet encore de vous écrire ces quelque lignes” (238).\n\nBut this resistance is limited. It cannot be ignored that her writing is allowed within a small\ncommunity of women, Marguerite and Julie forming an alliance against the male doctor’s orders.\nMoreover, the physical exertion of writing can only result in expediting her death, a fact further\nunderscored by the multiple announcements of her death that have appeared throughout the\nnovel.\n\nFurthermore, “le journal de [sa] vie,” her only extensive writing following her rupture\nwith Armand, serves in part to alienate her from herself, finally rendering her as a fiction, even to\nherself. In the first letter presented in the novel, written after the vast majority of the events of\nthe central narrative have taken place, Marguerite figures herself already dead at the moment of\nher reader’s future contact with her letter, which she writes not for herself but to redeem herself\nin Armand’s esteem. Then, she shifts from the first- to the third-person to talk about herself:\n“Pauvre ami ! votre Marguerite d’autrefois est bien changée, et il vaut peut-être mieux que vous\nne la revoyiez plus que de la voir telle qu’elle est” (45). Finally, this alienated writing is\nultimately inseparable from its author’s venal nature in its use by the narrator: “Si l’intérêt que\nvous prenez à moi est réel, Armand, à votre retour, allez chez Julie Duprat. Elle vous remettra ce\njournal. Vous y trouverez la raison et l’excuse de ce qui s’est passé entre nous.” (45)23\n\n23 The pleasure of knowing her side of the story is announced at the beginning, but deferred until the end. Cf.\nGoulemot, op. cit.\nThe art of containment\n\nIn spite of his affection for her, in addition to confirming Marguerite’s contagious nature, Armand seeks to contain her: after failing in his attempts to keep her in her apartment after her convalescence, he proposes removing her from Paris:\n\nIl semble que, si indifférente qu’elle soit à ce qui l’entoure, la femme aimée perde de son parfum et de son unité au contact des hommes et des choses. […] A] Paris, à chaque pas, je pouvais coudoyer un homme qui avait été l’amant de cette femme ou qui le serait le lendemain. Tandis qu’à la campagne, au milieu des gens que nous n’avions jamais vus […] au sein d’une nature toute parée de son printemps, […] je pouvais cacher mon amour et aimer sans honte et sans crainte. (157).\n\nMarguerite is once again the unsealed bottle of perfume that Armand described earlier (88), whose permeability is exacerbated by her presence in Paris, that center of urban capitalism where there are so many different temptations that threaten to re-contaminate her and seduce her back to her old life as a courtisane. In the country, Marguerite would be removed from the sight of people and protected from the seductions of city life. There, she can remain as innocent as the virginal spring. Thus Armand paradoxically hides his lover in order to love without shame.24\n\nAnd yet, when Marguerite writes letters to her friend/entremetteuse Prudence—letters effectively locked away from Armand’s view—in order to sell her possessions, the trappings of her venal life continue to circulate in Paris in spite of her supposed confinement in the countryside.\n\nCountry confinement also drains Marguerite of the spirit that Armand loves. What he describes as “une charmante petite maison à deux étages, avec une grille en hémicycle” (158), Marguerite sees as the mausoleum of a martyr: “Et pour qui donc viendrais-je m’enterrer là, si ce\n\n24 This is an idea that parallels, in some ways, Parent’s suggestions that arrested prostitutes should be transported through the city hidden in covered wagons in order not to offend the innocent or that so long as sewage was contained within the bowels of the city, waste could be rendered healthy and “clean.”\nn’est pour vous ?” (159). And she does indeed languish with the end of summer. So, in spite of what appears to be her real moral improvement, Armand proposes that they move back to Paris. But his efforts are again concentrated on keeping Marguerite hidden and confined: they settle on “un petit pavillon, isolé de la maison principale.” What he likes best about it is this: “Derrière ce petit pavillon s’étendait un jardin charmant, jardin qui en dépendait, entouré de murailles assez élevées pour nous séparer de nos voisins, et assez basses pour ne pas borner la vue” (180-181). This apartment, however, proves penetrable by men (and women) who restore Marguerite to her former lifestyle.\n\nThese examples of Armand’s failed efforts to contain Marguerite suggest both imprisonment and quarantine, the two interconnected systems used to deal with the problem of prostitution in Paris. While I do not believe that Dumas was overtly critical of these systems at the time, they do point out—to today’s informed reader—the erasure of the legal and medical institutions that sought to disguise their disciplinary power by enacting it in a natural environment: relegating the business of the reform of prostituted woman to the countryside and the garden.\n\nIt is also significant that the sentimental hero’s efforts at containment prove insufficient in the end. Armand appears impotent yet again, this time in his failure of will: he gives in to Margeurite’s wishes and restores her to urban life. As we have seen in the section above, Armand is himself lacking in masculine strength and solidity. The frame narrator uses narrative strategies that attempt to contain both Armand and Marguerite, but with mixed results. The only person in the book who successfully contains and redirects the flow of contagious, diseased and sexually out-of-control bodies is Armand’s father, whom—I propose—is the figure of Dumas’ ideal author. It is the (Law of the) Father who will facilitate, through his very writing, the final\ncontainment and siphoning off of both Marguerite’s and Armand’s excessive corporeal fluids: “Il fallait une barrière infranchissable, pour l’un comme pour l’autre.” (230)\n\nAs I mentioned above, the ideal author leaves only an entirely un-embodied, scriptural trace: the narrative must prove able to contain and master all forms of desire, sexual excess, and contagion. Who can do this? In all three narrations, the result of Marguerite’s over-determined “liquid” and contagious nature (a combined expression, I would argue, of Dumas’ point of view) is that she is too embodied—too profoundly female in all regards—to merit recognition as a writer. The collection of objects that she owned are washed of any individual story once she dies; her signature flowers tell only a cyclical tale of her embodiment as a woman; her presence, like perfume, evaporates, and her decomposed body—which briefly exerts such a powerful effect on Armand—is ultimately reburied and neutralized. The only stable trace she leaves is the collection of letters to Armand, but these are coded as “feminine” and venal: just as embodied, diseased and ephemeral as the physical traces left by her body.\n\nArmand’s traces, too, are too visibly the result of his excessive sexual desire. Looking more closely at his letters reveals that he is unable to write anything that does not communicate to Marguerite—an adept reader of male sexual need—the reality that his intended meaning is the exact opposite of that expressed by his words on the page.\n\nThe delicious problem with Prevost’s Manon Lescaut is that while the narrator presents it as a cautionary tale, ostensibly to warn readers against the power of desire for frivolous pleasure, it is Manon who is the most enduring part of the novel and who most strongly evokes the reader’s admiration. She consistently eludes the repressive forces of 18th-century Paris, escaping from convent, prison, family (embodied by her criminal brother); sent to America as a prisoner of the State, she thereby even evades national boundaries and the Church’s order of traditional\nmarriage. Such wide circulation of one woman is either unimaginable or too upsetting in 1840’s Paris, ruled as it was by the booming bourgeois class, underpinned by developing ideas of separate spheres and an enclosed, domestic femininity.\n\nIn his rewriting of Manon, Dumas separates the courtisane’s attractiveness (and the appeal of her revolutionary narrative) from her ability to circulate in the public sphere.\\(^2\\) He then couples her allure with her need for moral redemption, which can only be acquired via the receipt of another’s pity. Manon’s independence is replaced by Marguerite’s dependence on an “other.” This “other” is necessarily an authorial figure. Dumas’ seeks to contain Marguerite far better than Prévost contained Manon: he does so by making a fiction, a book, of her person, even within the reality of the diegetic world. The modern courtisane’s containment hereby exceeds the limitations of her physical circulation. This begins in the frame narrative, and is echoed in Duval’s first-person narration, which we shall return to shortly. Dumas’ valorization of the courtisane was “tolerable” because the story of her life and death serves to call Armand Duval’s voice into existence and to establish the narrator as an author.\\(^3\\) This is analogous to Charles Bernheimer’s claim that, in Eugène Sue and (by comparison) Balzac, the authorial figure, “the model of enlightened behavior […] thrives on plotting the elimination of characters whose erotically charged deviance provides the plot […] with its most narratable story lines. But these two apparently opposed plots are really one, deviance being tolerable only so long as it provokes the appropriate counter-discipline” (51).\n\nFrom the very first physical description that the reader gets of the title character, there is an underlying emphasis on keeping her contained, and out of public view. Her “distinction peu\n\n---\n\n\n26 But this is supposed to pass unseen, undiscussed. The frame narrator writes, “j’ai une indulgence inépuisable pour les courtisanes, et je ne me donne même pas la peine de discuter cette indulgence” (26).\ncommune à ses semblables,” and her “beauté vraiment exceptionnelle” is remarkable from a distance, but curiously lacking in details; her most exceptional characteristic is her invisibility: “Elle arrivait aux Champs-Élysée toujours seule, dans sa voiture, où elle s’effaçait le plus possible” (27). Dumas’ courtisane thus appears to self-regulate from the beginning, enacting on her own body the police regulation of prostitutes during Dumas’ time. The primary strategy of this regulation, as Alain Corbin and Charles Bernheimer have demonstrated, was “to control the visibility of purchasable women” (Bernheimer 16). Thus, even the popular and voyeuristic roman de la prostitution, as a member of the category of “novel,” a genre recognized in the eighteenth-century as a respectable and viable artistic endeavor, must be read for its engagement in the debate about the power and legitimacy of art.\n\nThe second physical description of Marguerite demonstrates the fact that art alone can “siphon off” the courtisane’s venality. An ekphrastic reproduction of a portrait by Vincent Vidal serves as a bounded frame through which the woman can be safely communicated. The novel’s reader is transformed into the appreciative artist, or perhaps his apprentice, by the narrator’s use of the imperative:\n\nDans un ovale d’une grâce indescriptible, mettez des yeux noirs surmontés d’un arc si pur qu’il semblait peint ; voillez ces yeux de grands cils qui, lorsqu’ils s’abaissent, jetaient de l’ombre sur la teinte rose des joues ; tracez un nez fin, droit, spirituel, aux narines un peu ouvertes par une aspiration ardente vers la vie sensuelle ; dessinez une bouche régulière, […] colorez la peau […] et vous aurez l’ensemble de cette charmante tête. (28-29)\n\nThe only detail on this beautiful head that could suggest a questionable mode de vie is the diamond earrings, “d’une valeur de quatre à cinq mille francs chacun” (29). The difference between the medium of narrative and portraiture is, of course, that the latter cannot speak to the\nartist’s knowledge of things such as the price of diamond earrings… or the impure nature of their origin.\n\nThus, the narrator feigns incomprehension in the presence of sexually charged signs:\n\n“Comment sa vie ardente laissait-elle au visage de Marguerite l’expression virginale, enfantine même qui le caractérisait, c’est ce que nous sommes forcés de constater sans le comprendre” (29). Here, he purports not to understand how the sexuality required by her livelihood is *not* readable on her face. Yet a few sentences later, he claims a similar ignorance when presenting a sign clearly indicative of her sexual availability: the bouquet of camellias she carries to the theatre every night. “Pendant vingt-cinq jours du mois, les camélias étaient blancs, et pendant cinq ils étaient rouges ; on n’a jamais su la raison de cette variété de couleurs, que je signale sans pouvoir l’expliquer, et que les habitués des théâtres où elle allait le plus fréquemment et ses amis avaient remarquée comme moi” (29-30). Now, it cannot be said that Dumas’ narrator was genuinely baffled by this sign of Marguerite’s menstrual cycle: the hero understands it easily, and makes it clear in his first-person account of his initial encounter with her.\n\nAnd the color code of the *courtisane’s* supposedly defining bouquet escaped the notice of some of Dumas’ peers: Jules Janin, in a description of Alphonsine Plessis published in an 1851 preface, said he paid no attention to a detail as unimportant as the color of the beautiful woman’s bouquet. It seems that the visible sign of Marguerite’s sexual availability is purposefully first included only\n\n---\n\n27 I choose to emphasize the feint of this incomprehension, in accordance with other critics. Naomi Segal, for example, says this passage “signifies his [Armand’s] failure to accede to her sex (in either sense)” (41). Note on “Our Lady of the Flowers,” *French Studies Bulletin* 11.41 (1991), p. 5-8.\n\n28 “—Parce que, dit Marguerite en se dégageant de mes bras et en prenant dans un gros bouquet de camélias rouges apportés le matin, un camélia qu’elle passa à ma boutonnière, parce qu’on ne peut pas toujours exécuter les traités le jour où on les signe.» C’est facile à comprendre.” (102)\n\n29 “Elle tenait à la main un bouquet : de quelle couleur ? je ne saurais le dire ; il faut avoir les yeux d’un jeune homme et l’imagination d’un enfant pour bien distinguer la couleur de la fleur sur laquelle se penche un beau visage. A notre âge on ne regarde que la joue et l’éclat du regard, on s’inquiète peu de l’accessoire, et si l’on s’amuse à tirer des conséquences, on les tire de la personne même, et l’on se trouve assez occupé, en vérité” (251).\nin order to subsequently be dramatically erased. The erasure of the venal is the trace of the artist, the aesthetically-minded reader. This is what will allow the narrator to comment at length on her death (which should pass barely noticed, “sans éclat” [27]): “je regrettais la mort de cette fille comme on regrette la destruction totale d’une belle œuvre” (28).\n\nThe Basis of Profitable Books: Inheritance and Interest\n\nLa Dame aux camélias was an immediate bestseller. It launched Dumas fils’ identity if not his career.30 He would later often refer to it as his debut work.31 However it was neither his first published writing (a short book of verse, Pêchés de jeunesse, appeared in 1847), nor even his first novel: a certain Aventures de quatre femmes was published in six volumes, four of which were in circulation by 1846, by Librairie Cadot, the same publisher that would print La Dame aux camélias. In fact, in 1847, a case was brought before the Seine tribunal claiming that Aventures was actually written by Dumas père. The case did not hold and the son responded that same year in the preface to the fifth volume in defense of the work as his.32 Yet in a letter to the editor of Le Moniteur universel in 1888, he describes this earlier novel as following the release of La Dame.\n\nPerhaps the public conflation of his own work with that of his father contributed to the young writer’s desire to define himself as a successful author inside the very novel over which he was then laboring. At the same time, we recognize in this work a desire to create his own\n\n30 The 1851 theatrical version really made his career; later critics would say that the writing style “du vrai Dumas” began with La Dame aux camélias (Claye).\n\n\n32 Dumas writes in the preface to volume V of Aventures: “[…] ce que je sais, moi, c’est que je ne signe pas les romans du mien [mon père], pour deux raisons : la première, c’est que, pour faire des romans mauvais, je les ferai bien tout seul ; la seconde, c’est que mon père n’en fait pas.” Dated Februrary 10, 1847.\nheritage, a fact that may issue from his self-identification as an illegitimate child, even though his father officially recognized him at age seven. But these autobiographical explanations are overly simple. The narrator’s identification with Hugo and Musset in addition to his biological father shows that Dumas imagines a writer’s heritage on a slightly wider scope, but one which does not exceed the ideology of primogeniture, a point we will return to later. For now, let us examine the effect of Dumas’ choice to re-write *Manon Lescaut*, which places him squarely in the literary lineage of Prévost.\n\nIn addition to inscribing the well-loved eighteenth-century novel as both an object and a palimpsest in his work, Dumas repeats, in part, Prévost’s narrative structure: a frame narrator serves as interlocutor and scribe for Duval’s story of illicit but pure love, and as archivist not only for the pair’s correspondence but also for Marguerite’s journal. The narrative arc is familiar: the happiness of the fallen woman redeemed by true love is sacrificed to the restoration of social order. This inscribes Marguerite’s retreat from Parisian society and her solitary surrender to tuberculosis in her Parisian *grenier* onto Manon’s peregrinations through France and her death in the American wilderness. In the end, Duval, like des Grieux, returns to his father’s good graces, and his proper social milieu, to recover from his bout of illicit love a wiser—and more family-oriented—man. \n\nDumas’ modernization departs from its eighteenth-century model in that the framing narrative, and its unnamed narrator, underlines its truth through the contemporaneity of the novel’s events, and his exclusive knowledge thereof, rather than their exemplary usefulness as\n\n---\n\n33 The narrator portrays Armand at the center of the final home-coming scene, where he was received by his father and innocent sister: “Je restai quelque temps dans cette heureuse famille, tout occupée de celui qui leur apportait la convalescence de son cœur.” (247)\nmoral instruction as Prévost’ *homme de qualité* had done. The narrator tells us, “D’ailleurs, il y a à Paris des témoins de la plupart des faits que je recueille ici, et qui pourraient les confirmer, si mon témoignage ne suffisait pas. Par une circonstance particulière, seul je pouvais les écrire, car seul j’ai été le confident des derniers détails sans lesquels il eût été impossible de faire un récit intéressant et complet” (17). The narrator recalls the Romantic poetic genius in his exceptional status, the journalist in that he employs witnesses to confirm his story, and the novelist seeking his editor’s approval regarding “un récit intéressant et complet”: thus while *La Dame aux camélias* was not destined to be serialized in a newspaper, its reader is assured all the same that it is “intéressant,”— interesting, profitable, and already completed, ready for immediate sale.\n\nWhat follows this opening further confirms that the literary market of the July Monarchy is as much a part of the novel’s truth as the narrator’s stated concern for the detrimental effects of prostitution on women’s roles as daughters, wives and mothers. The novel’s action begins with an account of the estate sale following the *courtisane*’s death at which the narrator purchases a book: a luxury edition of *Manon Lescaut*, “parfaitement relié, doré sur tranche,” that, as we learn later, had been given to her by Armand Duval. The announcement of the sale, the examination of the items up for auction, and the auction itself are situated between sympathetic sketches—stock tales, really—of two prostitutes, one a daughter and one a mother, and a summary of Marguerite Gautier’s life prior to meeting Armand. Thus, from the novel’s outset, the story of one book’s commercial interest is framed by accounts of venal women. Seeing the *courtisane*’s tales as frame reveals the production of a novel as one of the work’s primary subjects.\n\n---\n\n34 Dumas’ narrator does, at the end, return to the notion of his tale as exemplary, but only to underline its uniqueness, rather than its usefulness: “Je revins à Paris où j’écrivis cette histoire telle qu’elle m’avait été racontée. Elle n’a qu’un mérite qui lui sera peut-être contesté, celui d’être vraie. Je ne tire pas de ce récit la conclusion que toutes les filles comme Marguerite sont capables de faire ce qu’elle a fait ; loin de là, mais j’ai connaissance qu’une d’elle avait éprouvé dans sa vie un amour sérieux, qu’elle en avait souffert et qu’elle en était morte. […] L’histoire de Marguerite est une exception, je le répète ; mais si c’eût été une généralité, ce n’eût pas été la peine de l’écrire.” (247).\nDumas’ defense of the venal body containing a noble heart reverses the metaphor in the expression “don’t judge a book by its cover.” The second sketch of the arrest of a fille ends with, “Depuis ce jour, je n’ai plus su mépriser une femme à première vue” (26). This conclusion follows and contradicts the narrator’s explicit refusal to apologize for his attitude toward Marguerite only three sentences earlier: “j’ai une indulgence inépuisable pour les courtisanes, et je ne me donne même pas la peine de discuter de cette indulgence” (26). Followed to its slightly absurd conclusion, the analogy is one between the first glimpse of a venal woman and the cover, or the purported subject matter, of the courtisane’s tale that the reader holds in his hands.\n\nIn fact, the auction scene draws attention to the contrast between this book, the physical “body” of Dumas’ work of contemporary literature, the printed volume that the novel’s author could anticipate for the physical exterior of *La Dame aux camélias*, and the object containing the proven literary masterpiece, *Manon Lescaut*. Would Dumas’ supposedly well-intended work be consumed and cast off, like the public women described in the two sketches? Or would it attain a superior, exceptional status, like Marguerite? A desire for superiority, for recognition of this “debut” novel as an enduring work of art, becomes clear in the material nature of the scene describing the narrator’s contact with Prévost’s novel. The book containing Manon Lescaut’s tale is described as follows: “Un volume, parfaitement relié, doré sur tranche, intitulé ‘Manon Lescaut’” (35). The book is a unified whole, contained and adorned by a proper binding, with gilded edges to provide protection and decoration, and clearly identified by a proper name. This object clearly belongs in a well-ordered personal library.\n\nHaving worked with the Cadot press for the publication of the *Aventure de quatres femmes*, Dumas would have known that his own book, *La Dame aux camélias*, would be printed\n\n---\n\non “papier plus qu’ordinaire,” in *in-octavio* format,\\(^{36}\\) in two volumes, and given only the inexpensive plain yellow cover (Claye PP), as was routine for books destined mostly for purchase by *cabinets de lecture*, where many paying customers would carelessly handle the volume in succession. The first *tirage* was 1200 copies, an average number, nothing that would interest the bibliophile. In contrast, the fictional volume of *Manon Lescaut* contains a mysterious dedication that makes it unique; Dumas’ narrator buys it for 100 francs, ten times its initial asking price. This action silences the previously noisy auction attendees, and identifies him as a bibliophile before he even officially becomes the author-as-recipient of Armand Duval’s narrative.\n\nFor the reader to be holding the volume *La Dame aux camélias*, we must assume that this bibliophile succeeded in writing up and publishing Duval’s story, as he was instructed by the hero himself: Duval says to him, when beginning his account of his relationship with Marguerite, “‘Il faut pourtant que je vous raconte cette histoire; vous en ferez un livre auquel on ne croira pas, mais qui sera peut-être intéressant à faire.’” (66). The ambiguity of the word “intéressant,” returns, connoting not only “of interest” to a reading audience but also “financially beneficial.” The hero here identifies the frame narrator as an invested professional writer, echoing the narrator’s earlier use of “interest” in the introductory frame. Duval is “pitching” his story to the narrator just as the narrator pitched it to *his* reader, presumably a person well aware of the notion of literature as a profitable enterprise.\n\nIn addition to setting himself apart as a bibliophile, it appears important that the narrator’s choice to write this story be seen as serious business. The passage leading up to the\n\n\\(^{36}\\) In *Balzac, imprimeur et défenseur du livre*, Roger Pierrot says that the usual format for the novel (at least in 1829) was in-12, but that the in-8\\(^{e}\\) format was the ‘format de la littérature sérieuse’ (56). This will have changed by 1848, such that an in-8\\(^{e}\\) could be considered ‘vulgaire.’ Or it is possible that it is just the cover that is cheap, with the assumption that the buyer will recover it.\npurchase of *Manon Lescaut* situates the narrator, a self-declared “amateur de curiosités,” (18) precariously among other “curieux” (33). Yet a mocking tone and a society-insider’s use of initials establishes his narrative mastery over the heteroclite collective of celebrities, both famous and infamous, united in the salon of the deceased *courtisane*. His mordant description begins with mismatched pairs in stable binaries of proper and improper: the auction juxtaposes a duchess and a *courtisane*, a marquise and an adulteress. But then, the extravagant duc d’Y… is paired with both “une de nos plus spirituelles conteuses” and a “promeneuse.” The juxtaposition renders both women suspect, for it raises the question of whether the woman writer who dares sign her own name, might be just as deviant as the public woman who paid for the most expensive horses in Paris by laying on her back.\n\nHowever, what *is* clear is the narrator’s insistence that he is merely a disinterested observer in this salon, while he will claim membership in the one shared by Hugo, Massenet, and Dumas, père that he imagines in the passage at the beginning of this chapter. That his presumed authority over haughty society women and *le demi-monde* alike encompasses the\n\n---\n\n37 This description of the auction attendees, in its entirety, from which the phrases are excerpted in the text that follows above:\n\nL’appartement était plein de curieux.\n\nIl y avait là toutes les célébrités du vice élégant, sournoisement examinées par quelques grandes dames qui avaient pris encore une fois le prétexte de la vente, pour avoir le droit de voir de près des femmes avec qui elles n’auraient jamais eu occasion de se retrouver, et dont elles enviaient peut-être en secret les faciles plaisirs.\n\nMme la duchesse de F… coudoyait Mlle A…, une des plus tristes épreuves de nos courtisanes modernes ; Mme la marquise de T… hésitait pour acheter un meuble sur lequel enchérissait Mme D…, la femme adultère la plus élégante et la plus connue de notre èpoque ; le duc d’Y…, qui passe à Madrid pour se ruiner à Paris, à Paris pour se ruiner à Madrid, et qui, somme toute, ne dépense même pas son revenu, tout en causant avec Mme M…, une de nos plus spirituelles conteuses qui veut bien de temps en temps écrire ce qu’elle dit et signer ce qu’elle écrit, échangeait des regards confidentiels avec Mme de N…, cette belle promeneuse des Champs-Elysées, presque toujours vêtue de rose ou de bleu et qui fait trainer sa voiture par deux grands chevaux noirs, que Tony lui a vendus dix mille francs et… qu’elle lui a payés [...]. (22-23)\n\n38 There is a repeated assurance that the narrator can circulate as an objective observer in questionable circles without risking his health or reputation: “Moi qui ne m’effarouchais pas à la vue du cabinet de toilette d’une femme entretenue, je m’amusais à examiner les détails, quels qu’ils fussent, et je m’aperçus que tous ces ustensiles magnifiquement ciselés portaient des initiales variés et des couronnes différentes” (23).\nwoman writer—even though this work would seem to be the young narrator’s own first foray into writing\\(^39\\)—suggests that like Balzac and Stendhal, Dumas’ narrator is yet one more illustration of Margaret Cohen’s argument that male authors in the realist tradition “made bids for their market shares in a hostile take over of the dominant practice of the novel when [they] started writing: sentimental works by women writers” (6). It likewise reflects the state of the market at the end of the July Monarchy, in which, as Cohen shows, ideological and legal limitations worked together to exclude women from the literary marketplace (192).\n\nFor now, let us concede that it is Dumas’ position as a distinctly mid-century writer-turned-editor or even publisher—rather than his moral position, as was the case for Prévost’s *homme de qualité*—that guarantees his relationship to his reader and thereby his authority. Dumas’ fluency in the exchange value of literature is not only inseparable from his narrative authority, but is, in fact, the sign of it. The analogy of the luxury book to fiat currency is made by the fact that it is the gift of *Manon Lescaut* to its original giver that initiates the account of the love story that the narrator would later publish in his own interest. This creates yet another contrast—a class difference—with Prévost’s narrator, an *homme de qualité* whose apparent independent wealth is what affords him both the ability to give Des Grieux the gold coins that initiated his recounting of his tale and the disinterested authority with which the narrator writes.\n\nMuch later, in an impassioned speech at a climactic moment in the tale, the heroine herself affirms this awareness of the profitability of this narrative as she inadvertently points back to her two male narrators: “Tous ceux qui entourent les filles comme moi ont intérêt à scruter leurs moindres paroles […]. Nous ne nous appartenons plus. Nous ne sommes pas des êtres, mais des choses” (148 emphasis added). As we have seen, structurally, both Armand’s oral\n\n\\(^{39}\\) The novel’s second line reads, “N’ayant pas encore l’âge où l’on invente, je me contente de raconter” (17).\naccount and the frame narrator’s published book *entourent* the *courtisane*: they both surround and act to contain Marguerite and her words. The practice of scrutinizing—of hearing, recording and editing the *courtisanes’* words—is a reifying act of writing through re-reading. This is the business of the two men relating her tale. Like the luxury edition of *Manon Lescaut*, Marguerite exists merely to be admired, purchased and re-read. Any redemptive portrayal of the woman herself that may result is equated with the author’s own *intérêt*, with his attention, his amusement and his financial gain.\n\n**Conclusion**\n\nJust as the binding of the luxury volume of *Manon Lescaut* both contains and adds value to the eighteenth-century tale of venality, *La Dame aux camélias* undertakes to demonstrate that it is possible to successfully invent oneself as the sort of *grand auteur* able to keep a salacious subject within a controllable circulation. In so doing, however, Dumas *fils*’ novel exposes the fact that the very possibility of making a name for oneself is inextricably linked to the threat of contamination in the new capitalist market. The liquids that I have considered here as traces—blood, tears, semen, ink—undermine Dumas’ optimism, exposing presence in absence as a double-sided coin: on the one hand, a trace like a novel can put into circulation the signature of the suddenly-renowned author, whose work will circulate on its own, separate from his father’s name, potentially increasing in value with every exchange; on the other hand, the entire narrative—the structure and all three narrators—repeats, *ad nauseam*, a warning against the infectious, corruptive power of objects of desire allowed to circulate *ad infinitum*.\n\nThe desirable body of the *courtisane* is, in essence, merely another object to possess, contain, diagnose, narrate, paint, frame and master. Armand’s hysterical, sexually impotent body\nexposes the fact that the deeper cause for concern is desire itself. Thus, while Marguerite is in fact dead from the beginning and hence ostensibly “out of circulation,” no account of her redemption could ever negate that which most equates her body to the sewers: the disgusting truth that entry into the flow of capitalism objectifies all those who come into contact with the things that inflame, rather than satisfy, their desire. If Marguerite’s writing can only gesture back to her dangerous body, it is because, for Dumas, she is the embodiment of the undesirable underside of the trace: one can only control the circulation of something that is in one’s possession. And narrative, once published, is no longer under authorial control.\n\nIs there anything that can protect a name from the harmful effects of circulation? Perhaps: the ultimate message of Dumas’ novel is that the ability to control profit is the true crux of the ideal author’s authority. While the frame narrator remains nameless, he has something as powerful as the kind of name (nom), or rather renown (renomée), that Hugo, Balzac, Dumas père, had: he has capital. And this means he already has everything he needs to satisfy his own ambition. The corollary of Prévost’s homme de qualité, Dumas fils’ frame narrator, while young, has enough spare time and surplus capital to buy a book at ten times its established exchange value, and to get the story behind it published. He also has a wealth of what Bourdieu calls “cultural capital”: the aesthetic distance from the subject matter of a work of art, guaranteed by the education befitting a man of his economic standing. Capital, the cause and effect of his education, allows him to place the powerful institutions of science and art between himself and the object of his reader’s desire. The question remains: will it be enough?\n\nDumas fils, like the frame narrator, insists on entering into the flowing mire of the capitalist literary market by attaching his name to a courtisane’s tale and putting it into circulation. Like the frame narrator, he profits from telling a story that was not entirely of his\nown invention, banking—as he did—on the preexisting capital of both Prévost’s novel and Marie Duplessis’ renown. The edition of the book that the frame narrator purchased was an object that symbolically represents not only the courtisane, her lover, and their story of interest, but also “ce quelque chose d’écrit”: indeed, the luxury novel circulates in the book as the very trace of profit, the ultimate double-sided coin. Fame and fortune, the ideal product of ambition in a capitalist world, commodifies the author even as it makes a name for him.\nAn art critic and a five-franc whore walk in to the Louvre. If you just interpreted that sentence as the set-up for a joke, you probably grew up in a society dominated by Western white middle-class values: you have acquired enough cultural capital to know that the Louvre is an art museum, enough snobbery to presume that a prostitute would not share a critic’s sensibility for the “high” art housed there, and an expectation that a departure from social norms—on the part of either party—is a potential source of embarrassment, that staple of middle-class situational humor. The invisibility of the role that class plays today in something as seemingly individualized as humor—or aesthetic taste—is due, in part, to ideologies governing “high” and “low” culture that came to be naturalized of over the course of the nineteenth century.\n\nIn this chapter, I examine three romans de la prostitution published in the early years of the Third Republic that would have confirmed their readers’ expectations that a common prostitute prove ignorant in the presence of art and literature. I demonstrate how these novels—Marthe, histoire d’une fille (1876) by J.-K. Huysmans, La Fille Elisa (1877) by Edmond de Goncourt, and Nana (1880) by Emile Zola—use the figure of the culturally illiterate prostitute in order to produce aesthetic disinterestedness as an alternative to capitalist desire as a sign of membership in a social elite.\n\nBut first, let us consider—as a condensed illustration of my point—the aforementioned scene of the whore at the Louvre. It is not, in fact, (just) the setup for a joke, but the basis of a pointed commentary by Charles Baudelaire on art, class, and power. The mid-century poet and art critic calls on the rules of middle class humor in order to ridicule Imperial censors:\nTous les imbéciles de la Bourgeoisie qui prononcent sans cesse les mots : “immoral, immoralité, moralité dans l'art” et autres bêtises, me font penser à Louise Villedieu, putain à cinq francs, qui m'accompagnant une fois au Louvre, où elle n'était jamais allée, se mit à rougir, à se couvrir le visage, et me tirant à chaque instant par la manche, me demandait devant les statues et les tableaux immortels comment on pouvait étaler publiquement de pareilles indécences.¹\n\nAt the most basic level, the low-class prostitute represents the increasingly ubiquitous urban masses. Baudelaire’s point is that the critics railing against modern art are—in spite of their bourgeois education—still as dumb as a working woman of the lowest class who had never before been to a museum.\n\nOver a century later, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would be hailed as a groundbreaking scholar for revealing the implicit connection between art appreciation and class that seems to have been quite obvious to the poet. In his influential 1979 work, *La Distinction, critique sociale du jugement*, Bourdieu describes aesthetic judgment as a product of a person’s internalized class-based value system, a worldview that remains constant, even in the face of formal schooling and professional success. Thus, an individual’s reaction to a work of art, Bourdieu reports, positions him or her in a rigid hierarchy rendered otherwise invisible by the seemingly democratic access to education and wealth, the tools of social mobility in a capitalist republic.² That is to say, the\n\n¹ This comment appears in *Mon coeur mis à nu*, one of the author’s fragmentary works, written between 1848 and 1864, containing ideas to perhaps be expanded upon later. “Fragment 56 (XLVI),” *Mon coeur mis à nu. Oeuvres complètes*, tome I, Paris: Editions de la Pléiade, 1975. p. 707.\n\n² “...inheritance of cultural wealth which has been accumulated and bequeathed by previous generations only really belongs (although it is theoretically offered to anyone) to those endowed with the means of appropriating it for themselves. [...]The apprehension and possession of cultural goods as symbolic goods [...] are possible only for those who hold the code making it possible to decipher them or, in other words, that the appropriation of symbolic goods presupposes the possession of the instruments of appropriation...” *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste*. Trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 170.\nlower one’s class of origin, the more likely one is to perceive a representation purely in terms of the subject’s use value.\n\nConversely, says Bourdieu, identifying with a more elevated position in society—a higher class or class fraction—is strongly correlated with a sensibility that assumed a distinction existed between the cultural value of a given work of art and the use value of the subject it depicted. At least, this was the case by the time that Bourdieu began his investigation in the mid-twentieth century. Such a correlation did not necessarily exist before it became possible for a prostitute to actually occupy the same space as typical connoisseurs of classical-period paintings. That is to say, before the nineteenth century—when art became a commodity to be consumed in a capitalist economy, a universally accessible object in a democratic state—the value of a work of art depended more on the artist’s craft than the audience’s reception. Could metaphorical depictions of prostitution—like Baudelaire’s and others’—have played a role in making aesthetic distance a sign of the social elite? Absolutely. But how? Let us stay with the Baudelaire citation for another moment to see.\n\nIn the scene in the Louvre, the poet shows the dynamic link between art, values and class. The Bourgeoisie categorized works of art as morally “bad” for depicting subjects that, in real life, did not demonstrate middle-class values. However, the poet implies, it is not the choice of subject, but merely of medium that the critics object to; and this, it seems, is an insult to artists. The ironic image that Baudelaire paints—the public woman blushing before a nude statue—draws attention to the hypocrisy of the critics claiming to be offended by contemporary works of art that depicted aspects of their everyday modern life. The daily newspapers were full of salacious crime stories, reports of women arrested for soliciting, and detailed accounts of court proceedings. Access to these inexpensive representations of reality was practically universal.\nHowever, news stories were dismissed as less disruptive than serial novels depicting the same sort of events on account of the use value of ephemeral media: in a bourgeois value system, daily reporting did not serve the same function as eternal works of art, like paintings and poems.\n\nBaudelaire’s choice to pair “immoral” and “immortel” as opposing qualifiers for two works of identical caliber—(“Tous les imbéciles de la Bourgeoisie qui prononcent sans cesse les mots : “immoral, immoralité, moralité dans l'art”)—both of which depict a truth about the reality of the artist’s time—exposes the critics’ discourse of morality as a control mechanism. Public offense, he believes, is merely a tool by which the new ruling class seeks to subject artists to their control. Censorship serves to appropriate the means of artistic production to the reproduction of a social hierarchy; it helps maintain “art” as an exclusive symbol of the (new) social elite, in spite of the elite’s cultural illiteracy.\n\nHowever, the critics were not alone in fitting the discourse of bourgeois morality to fit their purpose. Baudelaire is, in turn, categorizing critics as morally “bad” for denying artists their right to truthfully represent society. His comparison of the offended bourgeois critic to the ignorant working-class woman debases the former at the expense of the latter. Yet it is an effective rhetorical move that turns the critics’ identification with the bourgeois value system against them. Now, Baudelaire was not particularly troubled by the presence of a prostitute at the Louvre.\\(^3\\) But he knew the snobby critics would have been: we cannot forget the anxieties about consumption—connoting both disease and the satisfaction of commercial desire—that a woman\n\n---\n\n\\(^3\\) Baudelaire’s association with venal women is well-known: in particular, Jeanne Duval, who worked as a prostitute at times, and the courtisane Mme Sabatier. As a recurring figure in his writing, the public woman is the compliment of the flâneur, the man whose anonymous presence in the crowds makes the modern city into a spectacle for his enjoyment as a consumer. See Catherine Nesci, *Le Flâneur et les flâneuses - Les femmes et la ville à l'époque romantique*, Grenoble: ELLUG, 2007. The prostitute’s appearance in a museum, a space that allows circulation within a socially diverse, consuming public is, therefore, rather unremarkable. Baudelaire is far more concerned with those whom she represents: in his art criticism, he often comments on the lamentable commodification and commercialization of art as a direct result of the bourgeoisie’s rise to power (see, for example, the 1846 Salon).\nlike Louise had come to embody in the bourgeois imagination since at least 1836.\\footnote{On the equation of the prostitute with disease, see—among others—Mary Spongberg, \\textit{Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse}. On the feminized image of the modern consumer see Rita Felski, \\textit{The Gender of Modernity}, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Because the prostitute was not only usually a woman, but a woman marked by excessive sexual desire, the analogy between marketing and seduction makes the line between the uncontrollable consumer and the unregistered prostitute all the blurrier.} For Baudelaire, equating the “bad” critic with the public woman effectively communicates the poet’s derisive view of the bourgeois critics as a threat to the artistic purity and cultural stability of the French nation. While considering—from a safe, critical distance—the amusing image of the naive prostitute, the Bourgeoisie suddenly finds itself collapsed, by the poet, with the object of its own exclusionary gaze.\n\nAnd finally, in addition to degrading his opponent, Baudelaire’s choice to depict himself at the Louvre in the company of a prostitute helps assert the poet’s own position as that of a superior fraction within the middle class. The tension of the social inequality between the poet (who associates with prostitutes) and his patron/reader is momentarily diffused through the shared laughter triggered by the venal woman’s reassuring ignorance before the works of the grand masters. However, for the author of \\textit{Les Fleurs du mal}—who had been brought before the tribunal in 1857 and found guilty of \\textit{outrage aux bonnes moeurs}—censoring art on account of the immorality of its subject was no joking matter. The moment that his reader judges Baudelaire for tolerating, defending—even flaunting—the presence of a five-franc whore in a temple of French culture, the inequality returns, but reversed.\n\nAs philosopher Jacques Rancière has shown in—among other essays—\\textit{Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et poétique}, the realist turn is marked by the movement to accept all subjects as suitable for depiction within the realm of art, even as art, as such, retained its autonomy. While those so inclined to study it did not lose sight of Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s 1836 study on which the French regulatory system was built, during the early years of the new\nRepublic, they saw the publication of several new studies aimed at satisfying—or perhaps heightening—the public’s growing fascination with prostitution in modern Paris. Journalists joined in, reveling in the failures of the Brigade des moeurs—the agency responsible for maintaining the regulatory system: in spite of the exponential growth in staffing and budgetary requirements since the 1830s, it proved incapable of fulfilling its charge to register and impose medical exams on the city’s growing number of venal women, the majority of whom were working-class. While prostitution was a “tolerated” profession, women suspected of practicing it outside the regulatory system were routinely arrested for indecent exposure (outrage aux moeurs). Reports of the steady increase in such arrests only made the impotence of the brigade des moeurs more apparent. Thus, by the mid-1870s, due to a regular appearance in non-fiction, the “gritty,” clandestine prostitute had all but replaced the courtisane in the public imaginary as the primary expression of anxieties related to contagion, class mobility and the flow of capital. For Baudelaire, recalling Louise at the Louvre was part of a political maneuver that helped produce a modern aesthetic that privileges style over subject in the new paradigm that both denies and affirms a distinction between art and non-art. The prostitute, as a real subject and a rhetorical figure, both offends and reflects the bourgeois critics who confuse figurative and literal representations. As a rhetorical figure, the offended prostitute makes the censorial impulse itself a sign of membership in a lower class and a moral offense far more serious than that of shocking a few audience members, or even that of selling sex on the street. As a subject, her very presence\n\n---\n\n\n6 For more on the growing inefficiency of this organization, the public’s frustration with its cost and corruption, and its eventual collapse under pressure from the press, see the concluding chapters of Jill Harsin’s study, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.\nconfirms the artist representing as necessarily part of a higher class-fraction, and opposes his cultural superiority to his critics’ posturing of moral superiority.\n\nIn essence, reproducing the possibility that a public woman could come in contact with art effectively perpetuates the notion that democratic *access to* cultural capital—an inevitable result of its commodification under capitalism—is not a guarantee of *authority over* it. Moreover, making this prostitute representative of bourgeois critics who claim such authority serves to question the legitimacy of their efforts to control the means of artistic production. As we shall now see, Baudelaire was certainly not unique in imagining the modern, realist writer as being in a privileged position to define modern art, as knowing what it takes to understand it, and as articulating how censorship threatens it. The same issues of class, morality and art raised in his humorous, one-sentence commentary appear—but unsurprisingly, more nuanced—in the novel-length depictions of prostituted women who engage with texts of similar cultural value to the statues at the Louvre. In the rest of this chapter, we will see how literate prostitutes come to represent bad (that is, excessively desirous) readers. The narrator’s authority over these women’s stories transforms medical and judicial discourses into a form of aesthetic distance from the subject of a work of art that, as Bourdieu found, came to be indicative of the social elite. I also demonstrate that—in addition to the recognized discourses of medicine, law, psychology and aesthetics—these early Naturalists also appropriated censorship itself as a counter-discourse to democratizing literacy, both within and beyond their novels.\n\n*Reading the Literate Prostitute*\n\nAs Mireille Dottin-Orsini and Daniel Grojnowski demonstrate in their anthology *Un joli monde: Romans de la prostitution*, a significant number of works—many by authors “de premier\nordre”—depicted “la putain, fille des bordels et des trottoirs,” particularly in the last quarter of\nthe nineteenth century (vi). These works, they propose, are so numerous and influential as to\nconstitute a sub-genre, the roman de la prostitution. Within that sub-genre, there are a significant\nnumber of novels in which scenes of the women reading serve to reveal their internal state. As\nNoëlle Benhamou has aptly pointed out, not only do such scenes reflect stereotypes about both\nprostitutes and women readers, but, furthermore, “le personnage de la prostituée dévoreuse de\ndevant, dont la vie est déjà un roman, amène surtout un jeu sur la création littéraire et une\nréflexion sur la mimésis” (168). I wish to add to this that novels in which the working-class\nprostitute appears as a consumer of art (visual and/or textual) as well as a subject of a\ncommodified artistic representation play off the trope of the venal public writer in order to\nreframe the relationship between commercial demand and literary production.\n\nThe first of these is Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1876 novel Marthe, histoire d’une fille, a bleak\naccount of the cyclical life of a young working-class woman who turns to prostitution after other\nforms of labor fail to provide a decent income. Marthe circulates through all types of venality,\nfrom the street, to the brothel, to the stage; she cohabitates with a mediocre writer, is kept by a\nwealthy young lover, but finally ends up back en maison. She is depicted contemplating\nreproductions of paintings while her new lover aestheticizes her, a moment that precipitates her\nrejection of a career on stage.\n\nHuysmans’ novel was first to press by only a few months: the subject was, so to speak, in\nthe air. Edmond de Goncourt had also been working on his own novel about a registered\n\n---\n\n7 Page numbers given for citations from both Huysmans’ Marthe, histoire d’une fille and Goncourt’s La Fille Elisa\nrefer to this anthology, heretofore abbreviated to JM.\n8 In addition to the novels studied here, romans de la prostitution depicting prostitutes as readers include\nMaupassant, Yvette (1884); Léon Daudet, Sapho (1884); and Jean Lorrain, La Maison Philibert (1904).\n167-182.\nprostitute, La Fille Elisa, which appeared in January of 1877. The daughter of a midwife, Elisa runs away to enter a brothel in the country, then moves to a maison de tolérance in Paris; she is then arrested and convicted of murder, having killed a man who tried to rape her. The second half of the novel depicts her life of forced labor and total silence in the women’s prison where she eventually dies. Reading offers Elisa an escape from both the brothel and the prison, and yet it also seems that it is a problematic reading practice that actually leads to her confinement in both places.\n\nBoth Marthe and Elisa went to publication amid an atmosphere of public outrage over readers, writers, editors and the serial publication of Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir (beginning in April 1876), the so-called Hernani of Naturalism. Like Goncourt and Huysmans, the leader of the Médan circle clearly already viewed prostitution as a subject of modern relevance, given that “Nana” Coupeau, the daughter of the failed laundress in L’Assommoir was, by the conclusion of the 1876 novel, already supporting herself with her body. In Nana (1880), the prostitute turned actress and courtisane will ruin an array of men before succumbing to disease just as the Second Empire crumbles. While giving Nana her own novel had been part of Zola’s plan for the Rougon-Macquart series since 1852, the debates over the press censorship of L’Assommoir and the two romans de la prostitution by Huysmans and Goncourt, seemed to precipitate Zola to publish the sequel, in which the prostitute reads “une histoire de fille” and parrots the offended critics.\n\nThese three romans de la prostitution are thus unified not only by their un-romanticized depictions of “gritty” venal women, their incorporation of working-class slang in conjunction with vocabulary specific to legal and medical discourses, and by their authors’ engagement in the Naturalist community (and, thereby in debates over censorship and the place of such depictions\nin the novel as a work of modern “high” art). We will return to the latter questions of style and politics later. But first, we will see how—within the narratives of these most unrefined, uneducated of women—Zola, Huysmans and Goncourt all stand witness to the fact that cultural capital (once exclusively the property of the social elite) was no longer preserved from circulating in the world of the popular masses. While on one hand, the authors appear to agree with the censorial bourgeoisie that realist literature, in the wrong hands, can have harmful consequences; on the other, they seem to suggest that the “wrong hands” most in need of policing might not be those of literate prostitutes, but those of the ignorant bourgeois consumers.\n\nIn the second half of the nineteenth century, literacy rates rose as a result of education reform a generation earlier, and the cost of reading material declined thanks to technological advancements and advertising practices. The effect was a radical shift in the place and the practice of reading in French society. Once an activity only for those educated elite wealthy enough to afford books, which were expensive, under the Restoration reading expanded with education reform and the rise of the cabinets de lecture, the rental libraries favored by the petite bourgeoisie. The demand for reading material spread into the urban and rural working classes, although the practice of reading differed from that in the middle classes.\n\nWith the continued emphasis on the individual during the Second Empire, distribution changes further facilitated the shift from reading being a collective practice—reading aloud—to a private one: silent reading to the self. This new practice made reading an interaction with an imagined community to which one could belong invisibly, but that also influenced social interactions: “the man who read his newspaper in his salon was taking part in public life, and his activity was perceived accordingly”: it was, in fact, required for participation in high society\n\n---\n\nClearly, the discourse shaping reading practice was also inseparable from the ongoing gendering and classing of social spheres. It is in light of this that we must also view the attention to the education of bourgeois children: literacy was seen as a path to moral supremacy... or failure. Young ladies, in particular, were considered prone to corruption should they be left alone with the wrong sorts of books. Naturalist authors—it would seem, anyway—tended to agree. The literate prostitutes appear to offer proof of the harm facing young women who are educated in ways unsuitable to a person who is, by nature, unable to discern fact from fiction.\n\nIn the opening pages of Marthe, the prostitute-turned-actress is being wooed by Léo, a bourgeois journalist and aspiring novelist. The narrative then offers a two-chapter flashback relating the woman’s life prior to her appearance on stage. While we eventually have proof that she can read, at first, all we know is that any formal schooling she received was only sufficient to earn her a place in an atelier making imitation pearls (12). This, however, suffices to let Huysmans point to a non-standard “education” as first among the commonly cited causes for a woman’s turn to prostitution. The narrator implies that both nature (a tendency to neurosis and laziness inherited from her parents) and nurture (a fatherless childhood) contributed to Marthe’s venality, but that the tipping point was her entry into the tutelage of the other women in the atelier. It is there that the fifteen year-old learns that the exchange value of her sexuality is\n\n---\n\n11 See Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s account of the reading practice of the very small number of prostitutes who were literate enough before 1836 to spend their leisure time reading. Their practice is described as a passive submission to pleasure: they are “des filles qui s'adonnent à la lecture” (56). Parent critiques this pleasure as neither intellectual or spiritual but sentimental: “on ne sera pas surpris d'apprendre que ces lectures roulent toujours sur des histoires et des romans, particulièrement ceux qui décrivent des scènes tragiques capables d'exciter de vives émotions” (57). What surprises Parent is the morality of their preferred reading materials: “mais ce qui paraîtra peut-être singulier, c'est qu'on n'a jamais rencontré dans leurs mains de ces livres licencieux et obscènes que recherchent les jeunes gens avec tant d'ardeur et qui en corrompent une si grande quantité. Dans l'espace de vingt ans, un médecin de dispensaire n'en a vu qu'une ou deux tenant un de ces livres. Qu'est-ce, en effet, que ces sortes de livres pourraient leur apprendre? la satiété ne rend-elle pas fade et monotone ce qui dans toute autre circonstance est un puissant aiguillon?” He uses their refusal of pornographic works to set up a dichotomy between them and young male readers who, if they are corrupted by such works, were at least corrupted in active pursuit of knowledge, while the prostitute's choice is attributed merely to an avoidance of boredom.\nhigher than that of her labor; or rather, as the narrator puts it, it is there that accounts of her fellow ouvrières’ romantic exploits awaken in Marthe the latent desire for her own:\n\nUne fille est perdue dès qu’elle voit d’autre filles : les conversations des collégiens au lycée ne sont rien près de celles des ouvrières ; l’atelier, c’est la pierre de touche des vertus, l’or y est rare, le cuivre abondant. Une fillette ne choppe pas, comme le disent les romanciers, par amour, par entraînement des sens, mais beaucoup par orgueil et un peu par curiosité. Marthe écoutait les exploits de ses amies, leurs doux et meurtriers combats, l’œil agrandi, la bouche brûlée de fièvre. (JM 13)\n\nIn the atelier, Marthe is exposed to language that transgresses gender norms (collégiens are expected, if not allowed, to discuss sex). The stories she hears are contrasted with the literary tradition of the courtisane redeemed by love. For those predisposed, the text implies, exposure to realist narratives can transform the harmless schoolboy’s scopophilic desire for knowledge, wide-eyed curiosité, into a desire to consume—literally, sexually and commercially—as suggested by Marthe’s burning lips.\n\nGoncourt’s novel similarly blames his protagonist’s turn to prostitution on a gender-transgressing form of education.12 As the sickly daughter of a midwife, the young Elisa had overheard too much about sex too soon: “La révélation des mystères et des hontes du commerce de l’homme et de la femme de Paris vint la trouver dans sa couchette, presque dans son berceau” (JM 67). As with the narratives that Marthe heard in the atelier, this illicit knowledge is framed in terms of literature, the influence of which on an unformed, unguided mind can only be\n\n12 Indeed, Marthe’s early exposure to the medical reality of sex (which I consider here) is combined with a history of childhood illness predisposing her to neurosis and a fatherless childhood—as in Huysman’s novel—, and a criminal mother (she subsidizes her meager income as a midwife by providing abortions). Furthermore, this problematic education—the product of a woman in the labor-force (as is, by the way, Marthe’s exposure to similar accounts of sexuality in the atelier)—will not be erased by the three years of gender-normative religious schooling that Elisa receives later “chez les dames de Saint-Ouen” (71).\nharmful: “l’enfant à la pensée inoccupée, rêvassante, assista aux aventures du déshonneur, aux drames des liaisons cachées, aux histoires des passions hors nature” (68). The bigger problem, for Goncourt’s narrator, is not only that Elisa was exposed to them. It is that these aventures, drames and histoires reveal truths about sex that belong to masculine-dominated discourses. Her “ignorance”—the narrator’s term for the socially acceptable narratives that restrict young girls’ knowledge of sex to the naive belief in “le nouveau-né trouvé sous le buisson de roses” (67)—was replaced with a blend of pornography and medicine: “d’érotiques détails, des matérielités de la procréation” (68).\n\nAs a result of her exposure to these stories—simultaneously too realistic and too romanesque—once Elisa reaches an appropriate age to formally study midwifery, she resists the medical books that she would have to absorb, finding the life they lead lacking in entertainment value: “La fille [...] disait qu’elle n’avait pas la caboche faite pour y faire entrer des livres embêtants. Elle ne trouvait pas non plus rigolo de voir, à tout moment, comme ça, des oreillers retournés par les doigts crispés de l’Éclampsie” (71). For Goncourt’s narrator, and for Huysmans’ as well, there is a certain reading practice which is inextricably linked to the prostitute’s education that fails to produce a stable distinction between reality and narrative.\n\nThis early formation, in which reality and representation are conflated, shapes how the women approach art and literature later in the novels. After the summary of Marthe’s initial experience as a prostitute, Huysmans’ narrator returns to the present to tell the story of the collage between the writer and the actress. When Marthe enters the apartment of the middle-class bachelor for the first time, she is met by his sizable collection of framed prints. She is drawn to the images—literally, physically—approaching the closest one with an outstretched finger, in a way that recalls her embodied manner of listening to the ouvrières conversations\nabout their men. The scene that attracts her attention is a representation that she sees only as a picture of “ces gens qui boivent” (21): the narrator tells us it is a copy of “Le roi des fèves,” by seventeenth-century Flemish master, Jacob Jordaens. True to bourgeois expectations of members of the working class, Marthe’s “reading” of the print is limited to her identification of the subject. Her affective reaction to the image is equally indicative of her lower class status. Marthe laughs, “à gorge déployée,” at the carnivalesque image; then, as if she were in the audience at a popular entertainment, “elle se divertit à contempler cette tablée de joyeux drilles” (22).\n\nBooks play a similar role as a distraction in Goncourt’s Elisa: restless in her life in the country brothel, the woman who had refused to read medical books turns, now, to the novels she finds in the bedroom of the madam’s sickly son: “au milieu de la disposition chagrine de son esprit [...] elle cherchait une distraction dans la lecture des livres, des romans qui traînaient sur le lit du jeune homme, et qu’il lisait comme un malade, en allant de l’un à l’autre” (83). If the son, in his illness, reminds us of Elisa as child, it is implied that Elisa, in turn, resembles him in his unhealthy, unfocused reading practice. Indeed, what unites Marthe’s raucous laugh and Elisa’s silent reading is the infantilization of women and the working class that the two women’s responses effect. Immediately following the above depiction of Elisa is a short chapter devoted to commenting on the child-like gullibility of the working-class woman: “Chez la femme du peuple, qui sait tout juste lire, la lecture produit le même ravissement que chez l’enfant”; like a\n\n---\n\n13 This is the title used in several nineteenth-century accounts of one of several versions of the scene, including published reviews of the Belvedère gallery in Vienna: the painting is also known as “Le Roi boit,” and is a representation of a traditional Flemish proverb. At least one of the versions was housed at the Louvre at the time. We will return to the details of the painting itself later.\n\n14 For a thoughtful consideration of the general ideas about the working class and the Louvre that informed the opinions of all three Naturalist writers discussed here, see Robert Lethbridge, “A Visit to the Louvre: L’Assommoir Revisited,” The Modern Language Review 87:1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 41-55.\nchild, says the narrator, the barely-literate masses cannot separate fiction from reality, art from entertainment. What is more, they tend to mistake the characters for themselves.\n\nIn fact, what seems most disturbing to the prostitute’s companion is the woman’s loss of self in her quest for distraction. Huysmans’ narrator says of Marthe that the chaos of the festive scene evoked a fleeting memory of her own past: “Elle eut comme une rapide vision des gogailles passées” (ibid). She briefly reflects, then moves on to another print: an engraving of “un des épisodes de la vie des courtisanes,” by William Hogarth, a well-known English painter of the same era. This one too provokes “des souvenirs précis,” however this time the image strikes her as such an accurate depiction of her former life that she momentarily loses her ability to speak for herself: “elle demeura, fascinée, muette, et comme sortant d’un songe, dit entre ses dents, ‘Comme c’est bien cela!’” (ibid). It is as if her own painful subjectivity disappears the moment she recognizes the subject of Hogarth’s totalizing representation as her own life.\n\nSimilarly, in the chapter on reading in Elisa, Goncourt’s narrator says that la femme du peuple is all the more childlike for this identification:\n\n[elle a] la foi de l’enfant qui ne peut lire un livre sans se donner à lui et vivre en lui [...] Ainsi de la confusion et de la mélée de ses sensations irréfléchies avec les choses qu’elle lit, la femme du peuple est impérieusement, involontairement amenée à substituer à sa personne le personnage imaginaire du roman, à se dépouiller de sa misérable et prosaïque individualité, à entrer forcément dans la peau poétique et romanesque de l’héroïne : une véritable incarnation qui se continue et se prolonge longtemps après le livre fermé. (84)\n\nWhat is interesting about this is that, for Elisa, giving herself to another, and stripping down her own individuality to inhabit a body that incarnates someone else’s fiction, is a literal practice that directly equates her reading practice with her profession. This makes all the more sense—and\nwill later inform both her crime and her reaction to her punishment—in light of the fact that her education had consisted of “reading” materials that led her to transgress the limits of gender norms, the result of which was an attempt to preserve her subjectivity by remaining silent. In her flight from the self via the novel, the working-class woman seeks (albeit illegitimately) to appropriate the bourgeois practice of silent reading.\n\n*La Fille Elisa* opens with a prologue depicting the sentencing of the prostitute to death; the novel is then divided into two parts: Elisa’s life as a prostitute before her arrest, and her life in a woman’s prison after it. However, the account of the crime itself is included in the second part, after Elisa is sentenced to a life of perpetual silence. This is significant. Goncourt’s novel is entirely about cause and effect. While he claims, in the preface, to seek to understand Élisa’s insanity as a result of the oppressive prison system, as Barbara Giraud has argued, he effectively anchors her neurosis as a preexisting condition resulting from her childhood. However, Giraud does not show that this childhood, the root of her conflation of life and literature that led to her life as a prostitute, constituted the formation of the reading practice that led to the crime of passion, which led to her imprisonment, which led to her insanity.\n\nIn her prison cell, Elisa keeps a letter her lover had written her before their outing. Reading it triggers her memory of the day. The circumstances in which a prostitute became a murderer thus are communicated to the reader by a strange composite of the woman’s memory, told by a third-person omniscient narrator (up to a point, at which the actual crime itself is related by what looks to be a transcribed conversation between the narrator and an unnamed witness). However, it could be argued that, in fact, two problematic acts of reading were the cause of the crime.\n\n---\n\nAs the grammatical errors in his letter indicate, the education that Elisa’s lover, a country-born soldier, had received was not extensive. His desire is nonetheless mediated by his reading, even though this was limited to works of piety, which was not usual [16]: [Il] était sans lettres, n’avait jamais lu que des almanachs et deux ou trois petits livres d’un illuminisme tendre à la glorification de la vierge Marie. Lorsque l’homme avait apparu dans le jeune homme, une part de cette religiosité s’était tournée vers la femme. Et ses amours d’abord chastes [...] avaient brûlé en lui [...]” (126). The opposition between the virgin and the whore is a commonplace; the soldier, however, does not appear to confuse the two types of women, even when using the language about one to connote the other. “Parlant à une femme, parlant à Elisa [...] la parole de cet homme était une sorte d’invocation, une effusion presque priante et délirante, un parler d’amour où des mots revenant des trois livres amoureusement pieux qu’il avait lus, en faisaient une langue de dévotion” (ibid). As the phrase “l’homme avait apparu dans le jeune homme” suggests, the soldier was using the only poetic language he knew, the language of religious devotion, to communicate his carnal desire.\n\nElisa, however, seems unable to understand such language figuratively. She is thus thoroughly shocked by his sudden, seemingly unannounced, advances: “Soudain, sans une parole, sans un mot, elle sentait sur elle les violences et la brutalité d’un viol” (127). Her reaction, to fend him off with the knife she was carrying, only provokes laughter from him: “elle voyait devant elle le visage de son amant qui avait sur la figure un rire bête et tout drôle” (128). She presumably stabs him out of anger. The reader learns that Elisa did not mention this to her lawyer because no one would have believed that a prostitute would have refused a man’s advances.\n\nHowever, at this point, we must recall the letter from Elisa’s lover, in which he had written “Rien au monde ne peut faire oublier tes caresse [sic] et tes baisers brulan [sic]. La mort seule me les ferai [sic] oublier” (123). If Huysman’s Marthe is indeed defined by her inability to distinguish between literature and life, between the figurative and the literal—as we have been led to believe—then the attention that the narrator of La Fille Elisa brings to Elisa’s reading of the word “mort” seems to ask us to reconsider the crime for which this latter prostitute had been imprisoned. It is during their walk through an old cemetery in which the soldier makes his move on the prostitute. She had refused up to that point in order to keep the public circulation of her body separate from the ideal love she imagines.\\textsuperscript{17} When it becomes clear that this distinction is threatened, she turns her lover’s words against him, making his figurative speech circulate as pure, and violent, fact. Her murderous reaction thus serves to silence not only her lover’s laughter, but also his improper use of language. She even rips up his letter after a while (128). In short, she seeks to destroy that which threatens her ideal separation of the pure and the public. This, Goncourt implies, is an act of insanity. Especially given that, in every other instance of contact with language, Elisa placed little value on such a distinction.\n\nA few pages earlier, the narrator describes the prisoner’s ritualistic reading of a page of the faits-divers section of a newspaper she found: “elle le regardait pendant son travail, en lisait de temps en temps quelques lignes avec les yeux que l’on voit à une dévote dans un livre de piété” (121). However, she reduces her actual prayer book to merely a supply of type with which she composes her own news-paper: she pieces together cut-out letters and glues them to an empty box, which allows her to correspond with a woman in her old brothel. The equivalency of\n\n\\textsuperscript{17} “Car chez cette femme, ayant, par moments, le vomissement de l’amour physique, c’était un insupportable supplice de se livrer ‘au petit homme chéri’ ainsi qu’aux passants auxquels elle se vendait, de lui apporter dans l’acte charnel les restes de tous, de le salir enfin, comme disait cette autre, de la publicité de son contact. [...] Et continuellement dans sa tête, dans l’élanement pur d’un rêve chaste, forgeaient, entre elle et le lignard aux fleurs, des amours avec des tendresses ignorantes...” (78).\nthe sacred and the profane, the commercial and the mundane appears to be synonymous with a practice that reduces reading to a form of distraction, or rather, a means of fleeing the truth about one’s self.\n\nIn Huysmans’ novel, the episode of the prostitute inspecting her future lover’s engravings similarly takes on the relationship between the “who” and the “how” of reading. Huysmans equally juxtaposes the democratization of the subject of a work of art and that of its audience, and maps it on to the trope of prostitution, which was already firmly associated with anxieties related to social mobility. Both the Jordaens and the Hogarth depict figures of the lower class in scenes that communicate social disorder. Yet the audience for such works had been—up until the nineteenth-century revolution in print technology—primarily, if not exclusively, members of the wealthy elite.\n\nPaintings, like books, had circulated in the same limited circle as signs of both cultural and financial capital: representations, even satirical ones, reproduced the existing social order. However, after the revolutions, advancements in lithography—including chromolithography—had two inextricably linked effects: the aestheticization of advertisement, which helped reduce the cost of newspapers and thereby dramatically increased distribution; and the commercialization of art, with the production and sale of affordable prints of works by the great masters as souvenirs or decorative objects. That Huysmans’ Léo—a mediocre journalist—could afford to furnish his apartment with copies of Jordaens and Hogarth attests to both the demand for reproductions of famous works, as a growing portion of the population was exposed to art reviews in the newspaper, and the availability of such reproductions at a low cost. The perceived\nloss of a work’s uniqueness—or a decline in craftsmanship required to produce it—effectively reduces its cultural value.\\textsuperscript{18}\n\nThe most troubling figure in the art-filled room thus seems—at first, anyway—to be Marthe, not Léo (even though he is arguably the more logical representative of the demand side of the market in cheap reproductions of original artwork). This is because her consumption of art reproduces only the use-value of the subject: the people drinking, and the brothel evoke only her own past experiences. The identification that the presumably reformed prostitute makes between her private life and the subjects of the carnivalesque paintings takes the debasement of commodified cultural capital one step further. While Léo displays a certain familiarity with art in his appreciation of his companion’s beauty\\textsuperscript{19}, Marthe’s appreciation of the paintings reveals a total blindness to their artistry: “ni ces opulences, ni ces fougues, ni ces débauches de chairs à la Rubens, ni ces pourpris de lys et de vermillon, ni cette plénitude, ni cette somptuosité de charnure, ni ces remous, ni ces vagues de carmin et de nacre ne la tinrent longtemps. Elle regarda, sans s’y arrêter, différents tableaux...” (22). Focused on seeking familiar subjects in art, and seeing art only as a source of entertainment, she sees neither the stylistic elements nor the social commentary that had, in the past, contributed to making the works of art iconic enough to merit mass reproduction.\n\nHuysmans’ narrator seems, hereby, to suggest that a certain uneducated (or miseducated) approach to reading can in fact have a deleterious effect on members of the working class. It is not Marthe’s lack of objective art appreciation that is most troubling in the novel: it is the unconscious response that takes its place. The scene of the actress in front of the farcical images\n\n\\textsuperscript{18} This is according to the old rules of what Rancière calls the “representational regime,” in which the value of art could be sufficiently guaranteed by the skill of the artist.\n\n\\textsuperscript{19} Léo compares Marthe to a painting of Rembrandt’s wife (21), a point to which we will return later.\nseems to imply that it is actually dangerous to combine art that can circulate freely as entertainment with readers who might perceive it not as entertainment but as a literal representation of—or worse, an advertisement for—social disorder. After seeing the Hogarth, Marthe sits down, pensively, as memories of her past life in a brothel come flooding back. “Elle songeait à sa vie d’autrefois. Tous ses souvenirs se réveillaient. Ces allures de bouge, cette saveur de fille qu’elle s’étudiait à faire disparaître, reprirent tout à coup et l’obsédèrent invinciblement. Plus elle s’observait et plus les mots étranges, plus les maladresses, plus les expressions qu’elle eût voulu oublier lui revenaient et jaillissaient malgré elle de ses lèvres.” (22)\n\nIt is as if seeing her own life depicted in a work of art makes her lose control of her body and speech.\n\nHer temporary escape from the practice of prostitution is seen as yet another failed performance, once the work of art brings out her “true” identity as a prostitute. Later, when she and Léo run out of money, Marthe sees no option but to commit suicide or return to prostitution. Her former lover, the actor Ginginet, explains her choice of the latter to Léo: “elle renonce à tromper les hommes. Marthe ne mentira pas, maintenant qu’elle n’aura plus l’occasion de simuler les geigneries du parfait amour : ce que les bourgeois appelaient piquer une tête dans le cloaque, descendre le dernier échelon de l’infamie, je l’appelle, moi, une expiation, un retour à l’honnêteté !” (34) Prostitution, thus, was not a practice, but an expression of Marthe’s nature. And art was able to expose this long before Léo could see it.\n\nProposing that art can expose social betterment as a role, the performance of which is no less deceptive than the work done by an actress or prostitute, puts an uncomfortable spin on Bourdieu’s claim that aesthetic taste reveals one’s “true” class. Yet this is what Huysmans does in making artistic representations of her former life the trigger for Marthe’s return to prostitution.\nIn spite of her conscious efforts to forget her former non-standard speech—be it vulgar or in a rural dialect—and to appropriate standard, middle class language and affects, when Marthe confronts a work of art depicting a “popular” subject, it literally reflects her: it causes her to reveal, to expose, her true (popular) class identity.\n\nMarthe thus embodies here the Bourgeoisie’s worst nightmare in two ways. First, she offers evidence that, should popular subjects be allowed to appear in realist art, they will one day see themselves and cease to perform as the docile, subjected bodies on which the capitalist hierarchy depends. The “mots étranges,” the foreign/outside/strange language, that surge forth, as a result of contact with art, function as a freudian trace of what the bourgeois value system would repress: the uneducated, underpaid working class women (on which their profitable enterprises depend). Second, and perhaps more disconcertingly, if her reaction to art exposes her proper class identity, art—which, in the prior representational regime, faithfully reproduced the social hierarchy—seems, itself, out of control, and puts the viewer at risk of revealing the illegitimacy of any claim to a better position in the new, terrifyingly democratic society.\n\nAt the conclusion of the novel, a letter from Léo announces his renunciation of brothels and his marriage to a boring but stable bourgeois woman. In it, Marthe is finally reduced to an element in a work of art, one which reveals the “honnêteté” of the proper bourgeois woman: “quant à Marthe [...], je lui pardonne toutes ses vilénies, toutes ses traîtrises ; les filles comme elle ont cela de bon qu’elle font aimer celles qui ne leur ressemblent pas ; elle servent de repoussoir à l’honnêteté” (56). Léo, the connoisseur of Rubens and Jordeans, would have known that a repoussoir is an art term frequently used to describe seventeenth-century Dutch painting: it is a figure that serves to draw the viewer’s eye to the main subject of the painting. If the fille in Huysmans histoire d’une fille is honest—that is, if her story tells the truth about something—and\nyet her role in Huysmans’ work of art (as in Léo’s life) is to point to the main subject, what is that subject? Not the nameless proper bourgeois woman Léo is marrying, but the failed bourgeois writer himself.\n\nThe Hogarth image itself also functions as a point of entry into the irony of the work as a whole. Some of Huysman’s readers seem to have missed the author’s sarcasm undermining the prostitute’s condemnation and the final return to order, citing Léo’s letter as proof of its moralizing function.20 However, those familiar with Huysmans’ other works agree that the author finds a young bourgeois poet-manqué in search of complacent domesticity much more of a social ill than the prostitute. Given Huysmans’ careful attention to detail in his art criticism, it is worth noting a useful, if perhaps unintentional, slippage, between the title of the Hogarth engraving and the image described. The work referred to in the ekphrasis as “une gravure d’Hogarth, un des épisodes de la vie des courtisanes”21 would seem to belong to the 18th century English artist William Hogarth’s series A Harlot’s Progress. These moralizing, yet satirical depictions of vice enjoyed a wide circulation, and would be familiar to both author and reader. The plot of Hogarth’s series closely resembles the clichéd path to prostitution I described earlier. The central figure in each scene is the heroine, and the series’ moralizing “lesson” is about the pernicious effect such women have on “honest” society.\n\nHowever, the image described in Marthe actually belongs to a different Hogarth series, equally if not more well known, with a different central character under scrutiny: A Rake’s Progress. The later series of engravings shows the young, bourgeois gentleman in each scene, squandering his inheritance on gambling and women before having to marry an ugly, old widow\n\n---\n\n\n21 Marthe 22\nto pay his debts, finally ending his days in the madhouse. The ekphrasis in *Marthe* is easily identifiable as the third image in this series in which the hero enjoys an evening at a brothel. While the women are the most visible part of this scene, and the subject of Marthe’s reading, the recipient of Hogarth’s moralizing gaze is the young man in the corner, hidden under the skirts of the woman on his lap.\n\nAs a disappointed Ernest Raynaud pointed out in 1890, *Marthe* isn’t really about the *fille*, but rather the couple Marthe and Léo, and sometimes, just Léo. Marthe disappears for entire chapters at a time. Similarly to the embedded Hogarth, the novel’s title creates the expectation of another reproduction of the clichéd prostitute, which the representation noticeably fails at times to fulfill. The subject of the novel’s criticism shifts from Marthe to Léo, from the subject of dominant bourgeois anxiety to the representative of the dominant bourgeoisie itself. In renouncing desire and art, *filles de joie* and his search for modern beauty, in favor of a banal tranquil hearth, is Léo’s end equivalent to the payment of a debt or death in a madhouse?\n\nIn essence, Marthe’s role as both a reader and a subject to be read conflates what Bourdieu describes as a working-class view of art—a literal interpretation that focuses on the material reality of the subject—with the bourgeois anxiety about reading women: that exposure to representations can have as corrupting an influence as contact with the reality they represent. The effect, on Huysmans’ reader, is that Marthe’s ignorance in the face of art feminizes and infantilizes the working-class practice of reading visual representations and confirms the dominated status of the woman reader. However, art also exposes one more trait that neither class nor sex alone can account for... the characteristic inherent to the prostitute that education\n\n---\n\n22 “Je n’ajouterai pas à ta stupeur en te faisant l’éloge de ma femme: ne crains rien, je ne te dirai point qu’elle est belle, qu’elle a les jeux de saphir ou de jayet, et que ses lèvres sont cinabrine, non; elle n’est même pas jolie, mais que m’importe ? Ce sera terre à terre que de la regarder, le soir, ravauder mes chaussettes et que de me faire assourdir par les cris de mes galopins, d’accord; mais comme, malgré toute nos théories, nous n’avons pu trouver mieux, je me contenterai de cette vie, si banale qu’elle te puisse sembler.” *Marthe* 56\nand reading only brings out: the endless quest for entertainment, an insatiable desire to consume. And because of this, Huysman’s depiction of Marthe’s aesthetic ignorance brings bourgeois superiority crashing down around her.\n\nThe prostitute not only confuses reality and representation; she sees both as means to satisfy her desire for what Rancière calls, in his essay on Madame Bovary, the “excitement” that the bourgeoisie themselves sought in every interaction with commodities, of which art and literature had become simply another example.23 Having seen, up to this point, how these two authors’ depictions of the literate prostitute reproduced the critical position on female readership from within the bourgeois value system, only to map it back on the bourgeois men who would dismiss their work, I will now, briefly, turn to Zola’s Nana in order to demonstrate this with yet one more example of a prostitute’s reading practice that more explicitly mirrors that of the bourgeois critics who fail to recognize realist literature as art.\n\nHuysmans had only recently discovered the early volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series when he met Zola in the winter following the publication of Marthe.24 And yet a reader cannot help but find, in Marthe’s vapid consumption of Léo’s prints, an echo of the scene in L’Assommoir in which the wedding party, chased indoors by the rain, kills time before dinner by\n\n23 In his essay, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Rancière gives a powerful summary of the affect born of the desire for democracy that originated in the bourgeoisie, but was spreading to the working classes: “the big concern of the 1850s and 1860s [...] was encapsulated in one word: excitement. At that time in France, the diagnosis could be heard everywhere at every time; society suffered from a fatal disease that affected the social order and individual behaviors as well. It had become an unrelenting turmoil of thoughts and desires, appetites and frustrations. In the good old times of monarchy, religion and aristocracy, there had been a clear, long-standing hierarchy [...]. Unfortunately that order had been shattered, first by the French Revolution, second by the rise of industrialism, third by the new media—the newspapers, lithographs and so on, which made words and images, dreams and aspirations, available everywhere to anybody. Society had become a hustle and bustle of free and equal individuals that were dragged together into a ceaseless whirl in search of an excitement that was nothing more than the internalization of the endless and purposeless agitation of the whole social body. Such was the discourse of the notables and the learned persons. What must draw our attention is the synonym they gave for that excitement. That synonym was democracy” (235).\n\n24 Ruth B. Antosh claims that he had only read the early novels by the winter of 1876 in Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986. p. 13. However, it is entirely possible that he had read, at the very least, the first six chapters of L’Assommoir as they appeared in Le Bien Public.\nwalking through the Louvre. The working-class museum-goers appreciate the hardwood floor more than the paintings, and one member of the party thinks La Jaconde looks like his aunt. Unlike Marthe, who judges the Hogarth positively as an accurate reflection of her lived experience, Gervaise criticizes the museum (and/or the artist) because she could not recognize her own situation in the subject of Veronese’s *Wedding at Cana*. The two are similar in that their appreciation of a work of art is based on the extent to which it reflects their limited, first-hand, experiential knowledge of their social reality. Not only do they both lack a command of cultural capital necessary to interpret what they see, but their understanding of “art” does not include the premise that a depiction of a specific subject can represent a universal (or at least more general) truth.\n\nNana, the product of the working-class wedding, similarly embodies the same view of art. Her literacy may not appear significant at first. Zola makes it clear that Nana’s writing skills are rudimentary. But identifying this view with a prostitute, rather than a laundress, more strongly communicates Zola’s position on such a view. We learn that Nana is literate, but not a proficient enough writer to pen her own letters to her son. This reflects a certain social reality vis-à-vis education in working-class Paris. However, Zola then metaphorizes her literacy. As a reader, Nana resembles her working-class mother in her inability to recognize herself in a figurative\n\n---\n\n25 Huysmans was also, admittedly, indebted to the Goncourts, in whose novel *Germinie Lacerteux* there appears an uncannily similar scene. Either way, for a thoughtful consideration of the general ideas about the working class and the Louvre that informed all three Naturalist writers opinions, see Robert Lethbridge, “A Visit to the Louvre: L’Assommoir Revisited,” *The Modern Language Review* 87:1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 41-55.\n\n26 We learn early on in the novel that, while Nana has in her possession the material effects of a literate *bourgeoise*—“du eau papier,” “encrayer et une bouteille d’encre de trois sous,”—she lacks the education to put it to use. Instead, she asks her older Parisian friend, Mme Maloir, to write a letter to Daguenet for her. The indirect discourse suggests that her distaste serves to partly mask her inability: “Ça l’ennuyait d’écrire, puis elle n’était pas sûre de son orthographe, tandis que sa vieille amie tournait des lettres pleines de coeur” (54).\nrepresentation, even when that representation—Fauchery’s article “La Mouche d’or”—is not a depiction of her situation, but, in fact, a textual portrait of her: “”\n\nThis inability to see the whole in the sum of the parts is common to Goncourt and Huysmans’ prostitutes as well. For Elisa, who at one point tries to decipher the writing on the packets of possessions belonging to the prisoners, “la vue des objets était comme diffuse, ne lui apportait rien de leur ensemble, de leur aspect général, et cependant d’infiniment petits détails entraient et se gravaient dans sa tête presque malgré elle” (115). Lost in her attempt to read, she becomes, herself, the surface on which details are engraved. Similarly, Marthe, while waiting for her first client, catches an alienating glimpse of her body framed in a mirror, and fails to recognize herself: “sa vue se rassérénait et elle se voyait, dans une grande glace à cadre de verre, prostrée impudemment sur une banquette, coiffée comme pour aller au bal, les chairs relevées de dentelles pimentées d’odeurs fortes. Elle ne pouvait croire que cette image fût la sienne” (17).\n\nThe image she sees is then described as a frozen composite of parts, adorned with the various effects of femininity: “Elle regardait avec étonnement ses bras poudrés de perline, ses sourcils charbonnés, ses lèvres rouges comme des viandes saignantes, ses jambes revêtues de bas de soie cerise, sa poitrine ramassée et peureuse, tout l’appât troublant de ses chairs qui frissonnaient sous les fanfioles du peignoir” (17). Syntactically, the women’s body parts are acted upon—at times violently—by commodities that, like the packets surrounding Elisa, leave an incoherent, illegible trace on Marthe’s body. This seems to suggest that a practice of reading that would makes texts and commodities indistinguishable from each other is necessarily going to fail to provide the reader with any significant meaning.\n\nThe narrator insists that reading—like the museum visit—is merely a way for Nana to spend unstructured time, a leisure activity: “le moment le plus dur, c’étaient les deux ou trois\nheures entre le déjeuner et la toilette. D’ordinaire elle proposait un bésigue à sa vieille amie ; parfois, elle lisait *Le Figaro*, où les échos des théâtres et les nouvelles du monde l’intéressaient ; même il lui arrivait d’ouvrir un livre, car elle se piquait de littérature” (325). Nana’s reading practice, like Elisa’s, destroys the division between art and non-art. Not only does it collapse theatre reviews with society gossip, put journalism on par with books, and conflate all books with “literature,” it also makes the use value of all these various texts equivalent to that of a card game. To a certain extent, this fits with the stereotype of the venal woman as the embodiment of the disintegration of social hierarchy: if Nana—like La Torpille, her balzacian predecessor—ruins men at all levels of society, and is, herself, metonymical with the collapse of the Empire, it only makes sense that she have a similar flattening effect on the hierarchy of products within the publishing industry. Indeed, the prostitute’s stereotypical excessive physicality is reflected in her view of reading as a distraction: satisfying her desire for literature can fill the time between feeding her body and adorning it.\n\nHowever, it is precisely in this excessive desire to consume—to enjoy, ingest, and discard—literature that Nana is not reflective of a working-class reading practice, but rather a bourgeois one. A few pages later, Nana follows the model of the bourgeois members of society, bringing the fruit of her solitary reading practice into collective discussion: “Elle avait lu dans la journée un roman qui faisait grand bruit, l’histoire d’une fille ; et elle se révoltait, elle disait que tout cela était faux, témoignant d’ailleurs une répugnance indignée contre cette littérature immonde dont la prétension était de rendre la nature” (337). In an article about the auto-representationality of the nineteenth-century novel, Franc Wagner points out that attributing these stock criticisms of Naturalist novels to a character so unperceptive that she fails to recognize herself in a journalist’s portrait serves a paraliterary function: to disarm Zola’s critics.\nI wish to add that it is not only particular literary critics that Zola seeks to undermine in this scene of meta-reading: it is also the class-based superiority of the values system to which they adhere.\n\n_Nana_ is set in 1870. If the scientifically-minded Zola makes an anachronistic reference to either Huysmans’ _Marthe, histoire d’une fille_ or Goncourt’s _La Fille Elisa_, both of which Zola had recently read and publicly supported, it is safe presume it was for a reason. The reference to the unnamed “histoire d’une fille” allows us to consider Nana’s reaction in the context of the debates over censorship and the role of literature in the new Republic. Her opinions—both her offense at the “histoire de fille” and her taste for literature as entertainment—reproduce the role of literature from the perspective of the censorial bourgeoisie: “elle voulait des œuvres tendres et nobles, des choses pour la faire rêver et lui grandir l’âme” (ibid).\n\nThis is not just because reading—and holding opinions on literature—has a performative function for the character: she is playing the role of dinner party hostess, which is to say, proper bourgeois woman. Only moments before, Nana and her friend had been recounting tales of their shared past as registered brothel residents: unmediated by the literary frame, the subject proved entirely unsuitable to the uneasy bourgeois male audience. On one hand, the opinion she offers later on the book she had read, “que tout cela était faux,” reproduces the working-class value system (the value of a representation depends on the accuracy with which it communicates the use value of the subject). On the other, the performance of dismissing the work on account of its subject conflates bourgeois and working-class value systems.\n\nThe character’s ignorance also functions as a critical reflection of the source of those opinions: when the uneducated actress dismisses the novel she had nonetheless read as “cette littérature immonde,” her crimes against literature are less offensive that those of the authentic\nbourgeois women (and men) whom Nana is merely imitating. Zola’s point in comparing the prostitute and the bourgeois critic is, like Baudelaire’s, that, while the working class might not understand art, at least they are not trying to control it.\n\nGiven the government’s anxiety over a perceived loss of control of a novel’s circulation—due to expansion in the print industry, and the dramatic increase in serialized feuilletons, many of which were targeted at female readers—national censors took it upon themselves to impose pre-Revolution rules of bienséance on the genre itself. The goal in penalizing authors for crimes against morality (outrage aux moeurs) was purportedly to avoid the destabilization of society that could result from the distribution of incendiary (revolutionary) literature to an ever-widening (and increasingly democratic, that is, proletariat) population of readers. State censorship offered the dominant bourgeoisie a means to identify and diffuse threats to gender and class norms (as well as political authority). To authors, however, censorship represented a threat to their privileged status as artists... that is to say, as men whose exceptional citizenship was protected by publicly recognizable genius, which positioned them above the vulgus and beyond the reach of the laws governing it.\n\nUnder the Second Empire, press coverage transformed censorship trials into public arenas for debates over the definition of literature and its role in modern society. Not only were new works such as Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary brought before the tribunal, but even previously published titles like Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris stood accused of offending public morals. All subsequent “literary” works would necessarily be mediated by the discourse of censorship. However, as I said earlier, the political rhetoric of this\n\n---\n\n27 I am drawing here upon the classical distinction between the content viewed as befitting novels and the accounts of everyday life allowed in news reports: Elizabeth Ladenson establishes this distinction, and its gendering, as central to the mentality in which the trial of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Mme Bovary took place in chapter one of Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007.\ndiscourse confirmed the conflict between the realist author and the bourgeois social order. Thus, for the new generation of authors under the Third Republic, mediating their definitions of literature through the discourse of censorship was, in fact, potentially productive for two reasons.\n\nFirst, given that, two decades after they were called artless and offensive, Baudelaire and Flaubert were securely incorporated into the literary canon, Naturalist authors were able to appropriate censorship as a cultural code that traced bourgeois offense back onto a novel as a sign of literary merit. Second, because both novelists and prostitutes were accused of crimes against morality\\textsuperscript{28}, novels about prostitutes simultaneously invited bourgeois censorship and flouted the author’s own tolerance for prostitutes in art. Thus, using censorship as a code for literature offered some authors of *romans de la prostitution* the possibility of recovering the distinction between a small group of men recognizable by their uncompromised artistic integrity and the undistinguished masses of dominant order whose bourgeois morality could be easily threatened by both ignorant public women and intelligent men of letters. Let us now turn to two authors whose experiences of publishing their novels about prostitutes demonstrate how these effects play out.\n\n\\textsuperscript{28} While the two crimes are covered under two different articles, which appear it two different books of the 1810 Penal Code, both are crimes against common decency, against “les moeurs” of an individual or the public at large. The crimes of the pimp and the pornographer were thus collapsed in the literary imagination (if not the popular one as well) during the 1857 trials of Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire whose works were brought to trial on the basis that “literature can be a corrupting influence [and] that the prime target of corruption is girls” in particular, but all women were susceptible (Ladenson, op. cit. 59).\n\nLivre III, Titre premier (Crimes et délits contre la chose publique), Chapitre III (Crimes et délits contre la paix publique), section IV (Délits commis par la voie d’écrits, images ou gravures, distribués sans noms d’auteurs, imprimeur ou graveur), article 287: “Toute exposition ou distribution de chansons, pamphlets, figures ou *images contraires aux bonnes moeurs*, sera punie d'une amende de seize francs à cinq cents francs, d'un emprisonnement d'un mois à un an, et de la confiscation des planches et des exemplaires imprimés ou gravés, de chansons, figures ou autres objets du délit.”\n\nLivre III, Titre second (Crimes et délits contre les particulier), Chapitre premier (Crimes et délits contre les personnes), section IV (Attentats aux moeurs), article 334: “Quiconque aura *attenté aux moeurs*, en excitant, favorisant ou facilitant habituellement la débauche ou la corruption de la jeunesse de l'un ou de l'autre sexe au-dessous de l'âge de vingt-un ans, sera puni d'un emprisonnement de six mois à deux ans, et d'une amende de cinquante francs à cinq cents francs.”\nPublic censorship and self-promotion\n\nThe year was 1876 and twenty-eight year-old Georges-Marie Huysmans was looking to make a name for himself as an author. Though employed as a civil servant, he had had a brief career as a journalist and was a self-published poet whose sole volume had appeared two years earlier under the pen name of Joris-Karl. He had just spent several weeks in Belgium, overseeing the publication of his first novel, also à compte d’auteur. It was possible to have his book produced in Brussels, he wrote in a letter, “a moitié prix de Paris,” due to the lack of regulation of the publication industry in the bordering country. His novel, Marthe, was loosely based on his own brief liaison with an actress at Les Folies Bobino in Paris. Huysmans was purportedly inspired by his appreciation for Germinie Lacerteux (1865), co-authored by Edmond and his younger brother, Jules. Huysmans would say as much in the letter accompanying the copy of his book that he sent to the older Goncourt on October 1, 1876. (This homage was unsurprising: Emile Zola, too, would later call this novel a foundational moment in the history of Naturalism: “Germinie Lacerteux est une date. Le livre fait entrer le peuple dans le roman.”)\n\nIndeed, Huysmans’ first (unpublished) attempt at a novel had focused on an ouvrière during the siege of Paris; however, he had abandoned it in order to take up what would become Marthe. He did so, it would seem, upon the advice of his friend Henri Céard, the future playwright who introduced Huysmans to Zola, and who had informed Huysmans, earlier that\n\n---\n\n\n30 While Huysmans would surely deny any similarity to a Romantic like Alexandre Dumas fils, it seems hard to not see Marthe as a descendant of La Dame aux camélias, the fictionalized account of the author’s love affair that became a best-selling novel and widely popular play. For more discussion of the 1848 novel as a work of self-promotion, see chapter three. Other elements, which I discuss below, offer stronger evidence of Huysmans’ view of Marthe, his first novel, as a way to produce himself as a literary great.\n\n31 Les Romanciers naturalistes, Paris, 1881\nsummer, that his role model was also working on a novel about a prostitute. It thus seems entirely logical that Huysmans sent Goncourt a copy of *Marthe* on the day it was released. However, the primary reason he gives for writing is that his début novel had been seized by the authorities and faced imminent censorship.\n\nIn his letter, the as-yet unknown writer expresses his admiration for Goncourt’s talent, before asking the well-connected public figure to read *Marthe* and to issue a public statement defending a fellow artist’s book, one that had been unjustly seized at the border “comme outrageant la morale publique.” The decision to confiscate the novel, he says, had been made solely based on the work’s subject matter, which was clearly announced in the subtitle, *histoire d’une fille*. Huysmans seems, at first, to seek the established author’s sympathy on account of their coterminous treatment of the same subject. However, as he continues, it becomes clear that the younger writer wishes, instead, to underline how his privileging of style over content unites him with Goncourt. Here, in his plea for the author’s public support, Huysmans rare repetition of words emphasizes his novel as a work of art, and himself as an artist under Goncourts’ tutelage:\n\n> Je ne comprends pas. J'ai cru, en mon âme et conscience, faire *une œuvre d'art*, morale et antiérotique. [.... Q]uand un auteur s'imagine avoir fait *œuvre d'artiste*, et qu'il se trouve condamné sous prévention de pornographie, il ne peut qu'en appeler aux maîtres qu'il aime, les suppliant de lire son livre et de le défendre, de vive voix, contre les accusations insanes qui pèsent sur lui.\n\n---\n\n\n33 “À la demande que j'ai adressée à la censure de faire mettre des cartons, il fut répondu : C'est inutile *le sujet même est suffisant* pour justifier la saisie du livre.” Ibid.\n\n34 Ibid.\nThis double insistence on his status as an artist seems to be the point of these lines expressing his utter surprise and dismay at the censors’ action. However, the writer doth protest too much, methinks. While Huysmans could not have known the exact effect that his letter would have on Goncourt, there are reasons—to which we will return momentarily—to believe that the premise of this introductory missive, sent to his idol on the day that his début work was censored, was more than a happy accident. But first, let us turn now to Goncourt’s response.\n\nIn his journal entry for October 3, 1876, Edmond de Goncourt records his receipt of the letter and novel from “un jeune homme, nommé Huysmans.” Then, as what many scholars have interpreted as evidence of the anxiety provoked by the news he had learned, he relates the dream he had later that night. Panic would be a perfectly understandable reaction: Huysmans’ letter informed him that not only had a younger, unknown writer just published a novel similar to the one that he was currently working on, but also that this writer’s newly-released novel had been censored purely on account of its subject matter. Appropriately, in the dream he describes, Goncourt finds himself imprisoned for having merely written La Fille Elisa, which was then somehow censored even before it had been published. In this prison, he writes, he is thrown into a crowd of other literary hopefuuls who seem to be awaiting execution. His distinction is doubly lost in the crowd of men about to be killed.\n\nIt is hard to guess which was the greater potential source of his anxiety for Goncourt: having been scooped or the threat that his own work may face censorship. The co-wr...\nbrothers had been preparing their novel about a prostitute, *La Fille Elisa*, since at least 1862, well before Jules, the younger brother, died in 1870, just before the violent outbreak of the Commune.\\(^{38}\\) It had taken the surviving brother several years to take up his pen as a solo novelist. In spite of the brothers’ position in Parisian society, their novels had not been exceptionally well received; this story of a prostitute must have thus doubly represented a sort of literary début for Edmond, just as Huysmans’ *Marthe* did for him. And yet a heightened fear of censorship would seem equally justified: a new writer by the name of Jean Richepin had just been found guilty of *outrage aux mœurs*, and imprisoned for a month because his volume of poetry, *La Chanson des gueux*, incorporated popular language and included a poem entitled “Fils de fille.” The situation must have felt uncannily similar to that of Goncourt’s own arrest back in 1852, when he and his brother had faced Imperial censure, arrest, and the correctional tribunal for a journal article in which they too borrowed someone else’s vulgar language: they quoted five lines written by a Renaissance poet. While they were ultimately acquitted, the arrest made a lasting impression, and marked the end of their short careers as journalists.\\(^{39}\\)\n\nIn light of this, it is easy to see why scholars have referred to Goncourt’s dream as evidence of his fear of formal censorship. And yet, while the narration does indeed seem to depict an anxiety-induced nightmare, upon closer investigation, we see that, in fact, it also illustrates a condensed method for transforming the experience of censorship into a means of resistance. In his dream, the author is angry at being one in a roomful of Baudelaire-esque writers on trial: “On conçoit facilement ma fureur intérieure du procédé gouvernemental, et elle\n\n\nétait complétée cette fureur [...] de ce que je me trouvais mêlé [...] à des confrères [...] esthétisant prétentieusement, le monocle dans l’œil.” Worried that his manuscript had been destroyed, his fury is coupled with a sense of loss. However, he soon realizes that the act of doing research—of seeking intellectual mastery of a subject—assuages all his negative emotions: “il arrivait que mon indignation d’être arrêté, l’horreur de la société au milieu de laquelle je me trouvais, la perte de mon manuscrit, tout cela disparaissait dans la recherche que je faisais....” The topic of his research is how he might position himself near the prostitute-murderers, whom he had been watching on stage, without becoming a subjugated spectacle himself: “sans éveiller l’attention d’un garde-chiourme terrible [...] à côté de moi.” Goncourt’s dream literally exposes the mechanism of the Naturalist author: the scientific gaze makes the writer invisible, in spite of his obvious affiliation with an objectionable subject; censorship, for having depicted the subject of such a gaze, is thus no longer an infuriating, alienating experience: to the contrary, it is proof of a flawless performance of a disappearing act.\n\nHuysmans absolutely could not have known about this dream. But as the admirer of not only Germinie Lacerteux but also “de tant d’autres merveilleuses œuvres”40, Huysmans was most likely aware of Goncourt’s feelings about state suppression of literature. The brothers had translated the experience of their arrest into their 1860 novel, Charles Demailly [Les Hommes de lettres], a work that used a plot based on the abuse of censorship practices to critique Napoleon III’s control of the press.41 While an arrest for outrage aux mœurs was indeed a possibility in 1876, the political environment was no longer that of the 1850s; for Huysmans, born in 1848, the trials of the 1850s were more legend than reality. The younger writer may not have shared\n\n40 Huysmans’ letter to Goncourt, op. cit.\n41 See Vantine, op. cit. The influence of this novel may potentially be discernable in similarities between the journalist and aspiring novelist, Charles, and the talentless journalist and would-be novelist, Léo, in Huysmans’ novel.\nGoncourt’s experience of arrest, and the residual fear he no doubt felt, but he clearly agreed with the older writer’s belief that censorship could function as a code outside the purvey of the government censors, and even undermine the dominant regime.\n\nBanned under the Commune, government censorship had indeed been reestablished under the Third Republic’s conservative president Mac Mahon in 1871. However, even in the years leading up to the 1877 crisis of le seize mai, the primary target of the Republic’s repressive forces were political critiques, not novels, even mildly pornographic ones. As cultural historian René-Pierre Colin points out, it was the Naturalists who were convinced—more than the leaders of the Republic—that the subjects of their writing were shocking enough to incite governmental opprobrium: “les craintes des naturalistes à l’égard de la censure et de la justice demeurent longtemps infondées.” Furthermore, Colin adds, the censors were, in practice, much less methodical than they had been under the Second Empire.\n\nHuysmans, a civil servant for the Ministry of the Interior, may have very well suspected that his book could be published without any condemnation whatsoever. By the time that he sought to send Marthe to press, it was far more likely for a novel to be tried solely by the press in the court of public opinion and rejected by critics or worse, simply ignored. Huysmans likely knew that the latter would surely be the case were his novel overshadowed by the appearance of a novel on the same subject, written by an established author like Edmond de Goncourt, which is one of the factors that led to his trip to Brussels in August. While he clearly wished to beat\n\n---\n\n42 Plenty of evidence exists to account for Mac Mahon’s censorship of materials in the press that were even remotely critical of his regime; and yet, in spite of the seizure of the copies at the border, Marthe was ultimately allowed to circulate in France, uncensored, as was Elisa the following year.\n\nGoncourt to press⁴⁴, Huysmans also anticipated the older novelist’s ire should be perceive a ruthless competitor behind the humble homage.⁴⁵ However, were Huysmans’ book to be suppressed immediately upon its publication, it could—given Goncourt’s position on censorship—provide the young writer the necessary means by which to ingratiate himself to his “maître,” establish a connection with him, and secure a positive review from a figure capable of helping launch a literary career. Now, is this conjecture sufficient grounds on which to suggest that a writer might have purposefully taken actions to increase his odds of having his own work suppressed by the French government? I believe it might be.\n\nHuysmans’ choice to have Marthe published in Belgium seems neither entirely cost-driven, as the author himself claimed, nor exclusively the result of a desire to avoid censorship, as previous scholars have argued.⁴⁶ Viewed in light of the delicate position he was in vis-à-vis Edmond de Goncourt (as both competitor and supplicant), the writer’s personal interest in éditions de luxe and rare books—another trait he shared with the Goncourts—takes on greater importance. What I am suggesting is that the author’s view of his own first novel through the eyes of a bibliophile (the importance of which I will discuss more later) supports the notion that he may have actually intended to attract the censors’ attention to the first edition of his book.\n\nWhile it was true that a self-publishing author could save money by having his book printed in Belgium, Huysmans’ decision to have Marthe published in Brussels could not have been based solely on financial concerns. Indeed, the above-cited letter lauding the reasonable\n\n---\n\n⁴⁴ Huysmans also insisted that his novel was the first of the two to appear in the preface to the second edition published in Paris in 1879.\n\n⁴⁵ “J’apprends que vous travaillez à un roman qui a nom la Fille Élisa. Je me trouve par un hasard malheureux pour moi, avoir travaillé, une année durant, sur un livre dont la donnée est, paraît-il, la même que la vôtre.” Huysmans’ letter to Goncourt, op. cit.\n\n⁴⁶ That his primary motivation was to escape censorship seems to be the general consensus on why Huysmans had Marthe printed in Brussels, first suggested in Robert Baldick’s biography, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, London: Oxford UP, 1955. See also Grojnowski, op. cit., p. 3; Colin, op. cit., p. 147.\ncost of publication was written to Eugène Montrosier, the director of *Le Musée des Deux Mondes*, a luxury bi-monthly literary journal. In it, Huysmans describes *Marthe* as a volume that would appeal to collectors like himself: “Un volume abracadabrant, sur papier teinté, avec elzévirs, titres en rouge, pages encadrées, fleurons, culs-de-lampe, et tout cela à moitié prix de Paris.” Huysmans did not just want to be published; he wanted being published to make his work marketable to a certain (elite) literary public. As a bibliophile, Huysmans knew that scarcity drives demand: if a luxury edition is desirable, a rare luxury edition is all the more so. Now, he could have reduced his costs and increased the volume’s rarity, by simply having fewer copies of the book printed in Paris. However, were the work to be censored, all copies produced in Paris would be destroyed. If it were not censored, however, if Goncourt had no reason to promote a rival author, *Marthe* would merely be lost in the Parisian sea of self-published books. It is thus possible that the preference for Brussels that Huysmans expressed as a lover of beautiful books appears inextricably linked to the risk of censorship that importing that book implied. By opting to be published in Belgium, and thereby attracting the attention of the censors (whose approbation he was ultimately able to avoid, thanks, in part, to some well-placed work colleagues), the artist was acting as a savvy businessman: he stood only to profit from the ability to promote himself that censorship afforded, and thereby increase not only the price of his books, but the cultural capital of his work.\n\nHe was also demonstrating his familiarity with Goncourt’s literary method that found proof of artistic merit in depicting subjects that were so far from amusing as to be prone to censorship. In the 1864 preface to *Germinie Lacerteux*, the Goncourts articulated their theory of representing *le peuple* in literature: in order to do this, the novel, as a modern medium, must be\nsimultaneously scientific, artistic, and moral. The authors also insisted that their reader not expect the following book to offer the “saletés érotiques” that filled popular fiction about prostitutes, among other subjects: “Qu’il ne s’attende point à la photographie décolletée du Plaisir: l’étude qui suit est la clinique de l’Amour.” In combination with his insistence that *Marthe* was “une oeuvre d’art, morale et antiérotique,” the writer’s praise of *Germinie Lacerteux* functions as a nod to that book’s preface. However, if the brothers had challenged the public, in 1864, to criticize their novel (“que ce livre soit calmnié, peu lui importe…”), Huysmans’ plea to Goncourt, over a decade later, paints governmental censorship as the direct effect of putting the latter’s theory into practice. Regardless of whether this was truly the cause, or whether the confiscation had been engineered, Huysmans no doubt expected Goncourt to recognize that the censorship of *Marthe* made for a powerful narrative, capable of galvanizing opinions and mobilizing a literary movement.\n\nCensorship not only situated Huysmans’ début work in the lineage of *Les Fleurs du mal* and *Madame Bovary*; it placed the author in the company of two century’s worth of great French authors whose works were banned or deemed unprintable in France. By having his volumes transported to Paris from a printer in Brussels, Huysmans ensured that his incendiary title could not escape notice. If the city of origin was not enough to draw attention, the name of the editor added an allure of criminality in the eyes of knowing border officers: Huysmans chose to work with Jean Gay, whose name appeared on the title page of other publications smuggled into\n\n---\n\n47 “Préface de la première édition,” published in *Préfaces et Manifestes littéraire*, Paris: Charpentier, 1888. The following passage is illustrative of this preface as a work of literary theory: “Aujourd’hui que le Roman s’élargit et grandit, qu’il commence à être la forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l’étude littéraire et de l’enquête sociale, qu’il devient, par l’analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l’Histoire morale contemporaine ; aujourd’hui que le Roman s’est imposé les études et les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertés et les franchises. Et qu’il cherche l’Art et la Vérité : qu’il montre des misères bonnes à ne pas laisser oublier aux heureux de Paris […]” (22).\n\n48 Ibid.\nFrance. However, rather than trusting Gay to deliver the volumes from the relatively small print-run (a thousand copies, as was customary for a self-published work), Huysmans opted to transport a portion of them himself (around four hundred copies, most of which were seized at the boarder). The rest, he left in Brussels, where they attracted little interest until 1879 when Huysmans’ Parisian publisher, Dentu—after releasing the author’s second novel, Les Sœurs Vatard—produced a second edition of Marthe.\n\nThis book appeared with an avant-propos by Huysmans justifying the appearance of a new edition: “Ce volume [the first edition], le premier roman que j’ai écrit, a été épuisé en quelques jours. Le prix élevé qu’il a rapidement atteint n’en permet plus l’achat qu’aux amateurs de livres rares” (7). While this avant-propos grossly misrepresents the truth about the immediate public demand for it (Gay actually sold the three-hundred and fifty remaining copies to another publisher), it does tell us what Huysmans had hoped would happen, and witnesses to his willingness to use the persona of the author in the interest of promoting his book, as both an intellectual product and material commodity. The physical appearance of the volume itself attests to his anticipation that Marthe become an object of interest to both connoisseurs of écriture artiste as well as “amateurs de livres rares,” a public that included (but was certainly not limited to) Edmond de Goncourt and the other writers that would shortly take up the defense of Naturalism.\n\nIn 1876, the group that would meet at Zola’s Médan residence was not yet fully formed. It was the remaining Goncourt brother who thus seemed, to Huysmans, posed to be the preeminent figure of literary innovation. Thanks to the circulation of his histoire d’une fille, within a relatively small literary circle, the civil servant turned author had successfully made a name for himself as a forerunner of literary innovation. As we have seen, while a certain fear of\ncensorship (like Goncourt’s) was not entirely unfounded, an undemocratic enjoyment of the notoriety it produced, and the escape behind the veil of scientific authority that it justified, were clearly consequences—if perhaps unintended—of the Republic’s efforts to legislate bourgeois values in literature.\n\nThe following year, when the debate over morality of *L’Assommoir* and the whole of the Naturalist movement took center stage, Huysmans would be considered one of the point men for a literary movement that consistently reappropriated bourgeois criticism. This kind of reappropriation—whether it was secretly dreaming of being censored or proudly owning up to the insulting epithet of “communards de la littérature”—is another product of nineteenth-century capitalist democracy that would remain an effective counter-cultural tactic.⁴⁹\n\n---\n\n⁴⁹ The phrase is from a letter Huysmans wrote to Théo Hannon, March 21, 1877.\nThe literature produced in nineteenth-century Paris offered readers a variety of prostituted women, often in juxtaposition with artists who are metaphorically prostituted to the demands of their public. From courtisanes like Balzac’s Esther Gobseck, whose control of artifice recalls the venal journalist, to street-walkers like Goncourt’s Elisa, whose unsettling circulation cannot be restricted by even the most rigorous censorship, the fictional public women seen standing at the intersection of desire and capital played a key role in helping writers define their profession. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, literate venal women appear repeatedly juxtaposed with young writers. The prostituted woman acts like a negative in a work that produces the image of the ideal author as a man of genius and skill, uncompromised by the public circulation and self-promotion that the new literary market demanded. The axiology of the upstanding (male) novelist that comes out of the century thus may generally seem to be a product of gendered divisions of labor, an aspect of the dominant ideology that makes the bourgeois (heterosexual) family inseparable from bourgeois capitalism.\n\nAnd so, it is now time to complicate—and even queer—the reductive tendency to see the narrative control of prostitutes, and the resulting socio-economic control of the literary marketplace, as a system produced through—and traced exclusively on—female bodies. Indeed, for some Parisian men, being prostituted was not a figure of speech. The visibility of sexually available to men in public space increased over the course of the Second Empire and continued well into the Third Republic.¹ Accordingly, in his expansive novel about becoming the next great\n\n---\n\n¹ William Peniston adroitly studies the confusion of all same-sex relations in public and prostitution in the two book-length studies from this time: Louis Canler’s Mémoires (1882) and Felix Carlier’s Les Deux prostitutions (1887). See his Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris, New York: Routledge, 2011.\nFrench author, *A la recherche du temps perdu*², modernist author Marcel Proust not only inserts a scene in a male brothel in the work’s final volume. He also includes, throughout the entire second half of the work, Charles Morel, an intriguing, complex character who plays multiple roles, including that of a male *courtisane* and even a pay-by-the-night prostitute. Morel, says contemporary literary scholar Elizabeth Ladenson, is “indeed one of the most problematic figures in the *Recherche.*”³ As we shall see, while Morel’s “problematic” nature may be due, in part, to his complicated relationship to the separate masculine and feminine spheres in bourgeois society, for Proust, his sex is not as central to his role as his social function. In addition to being a prostitute, Morel is also an artist: he circulates as a writer and a musician. Thus, I argue that, as a composite product of all his various roles, the artist-prostitute Morel serves as a complimentary figure to the hero (referred to as “Marcel”), making him—like the literate prostitutes I have studied in the preceding chapters—a negative image of the Proustian figure of the modern author.\n\nIn this chapter, I will begin by considering how including a male prostitute places Proust’s work in the lineage of realist novels: the character of Morel, as he first appears in the *Recherche*, prepares Proust’s reader to be transported beyond the familiar world of female actresses and *courtisanes* into the sociological reality of Parisian homosexual subculture, which included prostitution. However, because, for Proust, an accurate representation of material reality is hardly the point of a great work of art, I will shift the focus to the relationship between art and prostitution, as a generality that exceeds sexual difference. My reading of the “prostitutional economy” articulated through the brothel scene in *Le Temps retrouvé* reveals an anxiety around\n\n---\n\n² I will abbreviate the title of the entire seven-volume work to the *Recherche* (or *R* in page references) for the sake of concision. Individual volume titles, when relevant, will be given in full. All page numbers refer to the Gallimard Quarto Edition (2006).\n\nthe public exposure of certain kinds of labor: sexual gratification and artistic production. In closing, I demonstrate that understanding this anxiety helps clarify Proust’s distinction of Morel, in whom these two kinds of labor are united, as a central character of the Recherche.\n\n**Sexual Difference**\n\nMarcel Proust’s expansive work, *A la recherche du temps perdu*, is composed of seven volumes, written between 1909 and 1922 (when Proust died), and published between 1913 and 1927. In them, Proust’s narrator not only reimagines late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century French society; he also rewrites the rules for representing it: rules inherited from realist novelists ranging from Balzac to the Goncourts. If the latter writers had dared incorporate socially objectionable figures such as the *courtisane* and the *fille* into works that legitimized the realist novel’s claim to aesthetic valor, Proust shows that he is thoroughly capable of doing so as well, and moreover, of adapting the truthful depiction of reality to his pursuit of a modernist aesthetic.\n\nOver the course of his novel, the plot of which spans the Belle Epoque through the end of World War I, the Narrator repeatedly depicts the total collapse of distance between members of the highest Parisian aristocracy and members of the working and popular classes. Marcel—the protagonist of *La recherche* and the future author of a book just like it—resembles, in many ways, the young literary hopefuls of earlier novels. Following in the footsteps of Balzac’s Lucien, Dumas fils’ Armand, and Zola’s Fauchery in his pursuit of a literary career, Marcel strives to make a place for himself in Parisian society. His subsequent acquaintances come to include women of the *demi-monde* and the theatre in addition to noble women and wealthy *bourgeoises*.\nIn *Un Amour de Swann*—the Narrator’s demonstration of his ability to perform the nineteenth-century realist novel—the reader encounters Odette, a *courtisane* whose crass carnality rivals that of Zola’s Nana. The wealthy aesthete, Charles Swann, justifies his interest in Odette by seeing her as the subject of a work of art, recalling writers like Huysmans. However, unlike the venal women in novels up to this point, Odette escapes punishment for her social mobility: she ends *Le Temps retrouvé* not as a repulsive cadaver, but as an elegant duchess. The Narrator also observes, first hand, the social ascendency of another prostitute-turned-*courtisane*-turned-actress, Rachel. It is because Marcel meets her in a brothel, that he can then recognize her when she appears again as the mistress of his aristocratic friend, Robert de Saint-Loup.\n\nYet, in addition to calling on the familiar trope of the venal woman, Proust also shows he understood the spirit of the realist tradition of representing venal women: their common purported goal in doing so was to define the limits of art by pushing the envelope of subjects considered suitable for artistic representation. Thus, in addition to calling on the cast of characters previously considered marginal to high art—domestic servants, Jews, *courtisanes*, prostitutes—Proust’s narrator also introduces the figure of a male prostitute into his highly aestheticized novel. He thereby makes a real, working-class subculture visible in a work that has often been accused of elitism. 4 True, such characters were not unknown to readers of “romans montmartrois,” popular novels depicting the lower depths of society: pimps, prostitutes and gigolos living and working in Montmartre. 5 But for the more literary-minded audience that Proust’s novels targeted, the inclusion of a man’s relations with a male prostitute would have been surprising. And yet, unlike earlier writers who unabashedly sought to “épater les\n\n---\n\n4 Leroy, Fabrice.\nbourgeois.” a desire to shock his readers, or to accurately depict a world that he himself frequented, does not suffice to explain Proust’s decision to include male prostitution.\n\nThe reader’s experience of seeing something that had been present in their worldview, but marginalized by their inability to recognize it, is essential to the epistemology the Recherche. In the two chapters devoted to Proust in French Gay Modernism, Lawrence Schehr describes this practice as “revelation,” which implies a form of repetition that produces difference. Making a marginalized element of society visible calls the reader to engage with its undeniable presence. Yet the Proustian art of revelation exceeds this. Seeing, and then seeing again through the lens of narration, is what makes the element become “readable.” The reader of the Recherche is invited to go beyond surface impressions and received notions to interrogate meaning.\n\nMale prostitution is one such element, marginal to Proust’s readers, that has, oddly, remained marginal to Proustian scholarship. While critics like Schehr, Ladenson, and Michael Lucey have extensively studied homosexuality in the Recherche, and some commentary exists on the collapse of the salon and the female brothel, the presence of male, homosexual prostitution has avoided scholarly attention. Perhaps what happens in the male brothel in Le temps retrouvé seems to break the rules of revelation with the sudden visibility of something more unrecognizable that homosexual relations or sadomasochism. Perhaps, as Marcel says, “cette maison est tout autre chose, plus qu’une maison de fous, puisque la folie des aliénés est mise en scène, reconstituée, visible” (R 2236). The brothel, as a site that exceeds the formerly separate categories of homosexuality and prostitution, is “autre,” even beyond the reader’s understanding of homosexuality (“fous”), developed over the course of the novel.\n\n---\n\n6 On homosexuality in Proust, see, for example, the above-cited works by Schehr and Ladenson, Michael Lucy’s Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust. Duke UP, 2006. Studies focusing exclusively on female prostitution in Proust seem limited to the work of Fabrice Leroy. See below.\nHowever, this is not, in fact, the case. The reader discovers the world of male prostitution as he does everything else: gradually, through the eyes of Marcel—the Narrator’s naive past self—who comes to recognize what he has witnessed by re-presenting it. After helping the Baron hire a young musician to (purportedly) perform at his house, Marcel comes to understand the scene by recalling the trope of heterosexual prostitution. He remarks, “me rappelant la façon dont M. de Charlus était venu vers [le musicien...], je saisissais sa ressemblance avec certains de ses parents quand ils levaient une femme dans la rue. Seulement l’objet visé avait changé de sexe” (1406). Thus, at first reading, male prostitution does appear barely distinguishable from female prostitution. This, however, is part of the strategy of revelation: the first impression is often not only superficial, but it often appears to be the exact opposite of the truth that a second impression will expose.\n\nLet us, therefore, return to Marcel’s first impression. The musician that Charlus hired was none other than Charles Morel, who appears in the second half of Le côté de Guermantes as the son of a valet to Marcel’s relative, Oncle Adolphe. Morel brings Marcel some racy photographs of women, pictures that his father had set aside when Oncle Adolphe’s art collection was sold. This scene has two contradictory readings. On one level, we see why Marcel was not prepared to see the musician as a prostitute because of the literary tradition he was so familiar with that dictated an opposition between venal bodies and those empowered to circulate representations of them. On another level, however, the savvy reader is able to recognize the trope of the courtisane in the depiction of Morel as an arrévisite.\n\nMorel successfully gains spatial and social intimacy—access to Marcel’s bedroom and sociolinquitic intimacy (signaled by his tutoiement of Marcel)—thanks to some racy photographs of cocottes. Like a photograph, the young Morel presents a dazzling surface that communicates\neverything in detail but omits the truth of the working-class body beneath it: “Je fus surpris de voir entrer un beau garçon de dix-huit ans, habillé plutôt richement qu’avec goût, mais qui pourtant avait l’air de tout, excepté d’un valet de chambre” (948). His “air de tout” shows Morel’s eagerness to escape his class origins, while his rich, tasteless dress aligns him with the would-be dandy that recalls the uninitiated Lucien Chardon. While sexual difference would distinguish him from the women in the photographs, his presence in Marcel’s bedroom reads—to us, if not to the hero—as a cue that his circulation in society recalls the profession of the photos’ subjects. By bringing Marcel images that typically functioned both as material to accompany masturbation and as advertisements to attract clients to a brothel, Morel infiltrates a social rung above his birth by aligning himself with objects intended to both satisfy and pique sexual desire.\n\nWhen Marcel picks one particular photograph out of the bunch, one of Elstir’s portrait of “Miss Sacrifiant,” Morel reacts by saying he had meant to bring that very photo to Marcel’s attention: “mon père m’avait recommandé d’attirer votre attention sur cette dame. [...] Il paraît que vous aviez plu beaucoup à cette femme légère” (950). It is impossible to know for certain whether this was a lie, but it certainly seems suspect. Morel’s comment, however, shows his fine attunement to expressions of his interlocutor’s desire. In spite of Marcel’s dislike for Morel, the hero will continue to ask him about Odette and her relationships with his uncle, Swann and Charlus. Morel then doubles the value of the photo by claiming that Marcel’s interest in it confirms his similarity to a respected male figure. By doing so, he uses knowledge acquired from his father to flatter Marcel and ingratiate himself to him, positioning himself and the hero opposite the cocotte, on the side of the Oncle’s definitively masculine gaze.\n\nAnd yet, by doing so he seeks to increase his own value to Marcel, which, to the reader of the Recherche suggests the position of the literary courtisane. He reifies himself by virtue of his\nclaim to familiarity with the doubly commodified object of male desire: the photo of the woman for hire. For Morel, knowledge of culture is less an authentic product of social distinction than a sign of it: as such, it can be treated as a mask to be donned and removed at will.\n\nIt quickly becomes clear to Marcel that Morel’s purpose in bringing him the photographs was to promote himself as an artist. This similarity between the hero and the musician may also explain his later reluctance to see Morel as a prostitute. Marcel, who imagines that Morel’s father must have painted him as a future Racine, is sensitive to his plight. However, the hero distances himself from Morel and critiques an ambitious behavior that the reader can see is all too similar to his own.\n\nJe me rendis vite compte que le fils de Morel était très ‘arriviste.’ Ainsi ce jour-là il me demanda, étant un peu compositeur aussi, et capable de mettre quelques vers en musique, si je ne connaissais pas de poète ayant une situation importante dans le monde ‘aristo’. Je lui en citai un. Il ne connaissait pas les oeuvres de ce poète et n’avait jamais entendu son nom, qu’il prit en note. Or je sus que peu après il avait écrit à ce poète pour lui dire qu’admirateur fanatique de ses oeuvres, il avait fait de la musique sur un sonnet de lui et serait heureux que le librettiste en fît donner une audition chez la comtesse ***. C’était aller un peu vite et démasquer son plan. (949).\n\nIt is of note that Marcel critiques Morel here for two things: first, for not having enough personal knowledge of the poet’s work before trying to build on it, and second, for having revealed his plan by acting too quickly. What sets these two young men from different classes apart, what differentiates Marcel from Morel here, is thus not a self-promoting practice but a lack of depth and an excessive visibility.\nMorel is thus, from the beginning, the embodiment of a practice of revelation that works counter to the laws of the work of art that Marcel will come to create. And yet establishing his similarity is an important part of the practice of learning to read beneath the surface. Morel’s sex, in that it appears identical, at first, to Marcel’s, is thus part of the process of distinguishing the true artist.\n\nReading Male Prostitution\n\nOver four hundred pages separate Marcel’s first encounter with Morel and the next time he sees him, at the train station in Doncières, where Charlus will hire him to “play music.” During this time, Marcel (and his reader) come to a richer understanding of homosexuality, thanks to the courtyard scene between Charlus and his lover Jupien that opens the volume entitled Sodome et Gomorrhe. This scene is characterized by the multiplicity of metaphors that the Narrator uses to describe the two men courting, then having sex: while Marcel does not see their dance, their pollination, he overhears everything from his veiled location.\n\nThe train station scene that we will now consider is thus initially remarkable for the fact that Marcel appears to have “forgotten” to be on the look-out for male homosexual desire. The difference that his failure to recognize signals is, indeed, important to a thorough understanding of Morel’s role in the Recherche. During the Second Empire and the Third Republic, Paris gave rise to a rising working-class homosexual subculture, a culture that Proust’s readers may have previously considered beyond the scope of artistic representation, if not also something that\n\n---\n\n7 In “Proust: Forgetting Homosexuality,” the first chapter of French Gay Modernism, Schehr writes, “the narrator desires to have readers focus on the subjective position of the adolescent character, who is unaware of exactly what is happening and who is still confused by contradictory information and signs. To identify with the learning process and apprenticeship of Marcel as he becomes the narrator and to follow the bildungsroman as such, readers cannot occupy a position totally superior in knowledge to Marcel; rather, they should sympathetically identify with Marcel’s incomprehension” (16).\nshould remain invisible in real life. In the train station scene, Morel’s return into Marcel’s field of sight thus transports the reader beyond heterosexual prostitution into the reality of homosexual prostitution. The face of this cultural reality seemed radically different from the scene between Jupien and Charlus, whose homosexuality could still be restricted to the aristocracy, and dismissed as the effete eccentricity of a dying class.\n\nIn *Sodome et Gomorrhe II*, Marcel, having begun his relationship with Albertine, is personally learning about the instability of signs of love. He is thus distracted when he runs into Charlus at the station, where the Baron is supposedly waiting to catch a train to Paris. He recounts first his impression of Charlus’ youthful appearance, and then his request that Marcel do him the following favor: “il me demanda de vouloir bien appeler un militaire, parent à lui, qui était de l’autre côté de la voie exactement comme s’il allait monter dans notre train, mais en sens inverse” (1405). As Marcel approaches the young man, and realizing it is Morel begins to speak with him, Charlus barges in and offers him five hundred francs to play music at his house that evening. Once back on the train, Marcel wonders how Charlus knew Morel until it dawns on him that he had just witnessed the Baron picking up a young man, a complete stranger.\n\nWhile Proust’s reader may recognize the trope of the train traveling in the opposite direction as a sign of homosexuality, and easily read in the invitation to play music a proposition of sex, Marcel does not comprehend what had just happened until he replays the scene in his mind. The line cited earlier tells us that the only framework Marcel is able to fit this scene in to is that of heterosexual prostitution: “me rappelant la façon dont M. de Charlus était venu vers Morel et moi, je saisissais sa ressemblance avec certains de ses parents quand ils levayaient une femme dans la rue. Seulement l’objet visé avait changé de sexe” (1406). However, this\nframework, the reader realizes, is in fact, insufficient. Male prostitution is, in some ways, a distinct social reality from the system that has become so familiar by now.\n\nThe encounter between Charlus and Morel effectively represents a number of elements of a code proper to what William Peniston and Regis Revenin describe in their studies of police records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a Parisian homosexual “subculture”. Working- and middle-class homosexual men looking for friendship, sex, relationships, etc. appropriated to their own uses the new modern, urban spaces. Just as venal women had appropriated the passages for the purpose of propositioning unknown passers-by, men, too, frequented passages and train stations. Such spaces allowed, and even promoted, anonymous intermingling between people of varying ages and class backgrounds, in a setting built on—and synonymous with—growing consumerism. Although “young men in their twenties and thirties were at the center” of this subculture (Peniston 5), and the aristocrats and bourgeois men were a minority, wealthy and/or older men did also appear in these spaces, as the arrests documented in police files indicate. Thus, while Marcel is confused by Charlus’ presence at the station in Doncières when he has no intention of getting on a train, as well as the cold cream, died mustache, and “l’animation du teint chez un être encore jeune” (R 1405), his behavior is far from curious to someone familiar with this marginal culture. However, as we shall see, Proust’s inclusion of particular aspects of this culture exceeds the realist practice of proving a work of art by its ability to depict what is.\n\nGiven the public nature of these meeting places, homosexual subculture redefines visibility, as prostitution had for writers since Balzac, which makes it valuable in understanding the Proustian aesthetic. Public spaces, with little seclusion, afforded couples limited privacy, and\n\n---\n\n8 A “subculture” can be loosely defined as a group of people with something in common, with a reputation for creativity and nonconformity, who are not tied to neighborhoods or families (Peniston 67-68)\nworking-class men could afford an apartment like “Charmes” where Charlus would meet Morel, exhibitionism, and its pair, voyeurism (this important part of the narrative practice in the Proustian novel), became part of the sexual practice. Homosexual eroticism was not limited to brothels, as suggested by the cases of arrests for public masturbation, alone, in pairs or groups, or sodomy, recorded on the Champs Elysées, the boulevard des Capucines, and near the Gare Saint-Lazare (Peniston 95). And while meeting in public is not criminal, sex in public is: when the invisible signs led to visible behavior, the effects of “reading” can be considered a crime.\n\nProust translates this aspect of homosexual culture into the general law of metaphor and its gradual unpacking—what Gilles Deleuze calls apprentissage—that governs the progression of the Recherche. While Marcel had proven able to understand the metaphors in the scene between Charlus and Jupien, he fails to read signs in the train station that were evident to both Morel and Charlus. The two easily navigate a vocabulary of metaphor, in which “music” takes the place of sex: “Je désirais entendre ce soir un peu de musique, dit-il à Morel sans aucune entrée en matière, je donne cinq-cents francs pour la soirée, cela pourrait avoir quelque intérêt pour un de vos amis, si vous en avez dans la musique” (1405).\n\nThe difference between the courtyard scene and the train station at Doncières is the shift of homosexuality from private to public space. “Reading” subtle signs in public places was indeed required of men in this subculture who wished to satisfy their sexual desire without risking arrest for solicitation. But moreover, by including male prostitution in the novel, Proust introduces a new dynamic of reading difference between what is visible and what can only\n\n---\n\n9 Proust’s narrator offers a similar, if less detailed, account in La Prisonnière of one flânerie between the “quartier aristocratique” and Montmartre that suggests the Narrator was not unaware of availability of venal men, even while reinscribing the notion they didn’t exist. He mistakes a male driver for a woman on the sidewalk (une “trottoireuse”?): “Sur le trottoir une femme peu élégante […] passait, trop clair dans un paletot sac en poil de chèvre ; mais non, ce n’était pas une femme, c’était un chauffeur qui, enveloppé dans sa peau de bique, gagnait à pied son garage” (1705)\n\nbecome readable. Up to this point, if it was difficult to distinguish the *courtisane* from the bourgeois woman, at least it was easy to distinguish a prostitute from her client. If the courtyard scene taught us that some people who look like men may be women at heart, this scene moves us toward the conclusion that an object’s readability depends more on the way it is read than on a truth intrinsic to the object itself.\n\nAs Morel’s appearances in the *Recherche* increase, he will often be misread by characters representative of the bourgeoisie, unable to bridge the distance between prostitution and homosexuality, and between homosexual prostitution and the society they know. Doctor Cottard will misinterpret his observation of Charlus’ frequent trips into the public urinals as the effect of an illicit encounter with a *fille publique* rather than the prelude to one with a man, in spite of the obvious fact that women were not permitted to use the new *vespasienes*. For Mme de Cambremer, who is aware of Charlus’ sexuality, the possibility of having a kept man in her salon is so out of the question that she either consciously or unconsciously separates the violinist’s name from the venal body linked to Charlus: “Pressée de questions, Mme de Cambremer finit par dire: ‘On prétend que c’est lui qui faisait vivre un monsieur Moreau, Morille, Morue, je ne sais plus. Aucun rapport, bien entendu, avec Morel, le violoniste,’ ajouta-t-elle en rougissant”.\n\nNow, this breakdown of the language of difference is not imposed by the author: it was native to the representation of homosexuality in the dominant discourse. The *police des moeurs* were eager to arrest homosexual men, whom they believed criminal in nature, in spite of the decriminalization of sodomy during the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth-century. However, the police did not always choose to describe the precise nature of the encounters they would record simply as “public offences against decency”: they instead seemed to prefer vague terms that implied the men’s illicit behavior. Louis Canler, chief of the *Service de Sûreté* in the\nmid-nineteenth century, and Félix Carlier, chief of the *Service des moeurs* under the Second Empire both used the language of prostituted women and criminals to categorize homosexual men, regardless of the actual nature of the relationship between the men arrested.\\(^1\\) Perhaps due to a shared desire to not see them, or as a result of the vague language, the police, and the bourgeoisie at large, didn’t always know how to interpret what they saw.\n\nIn contrast to Cottard and Mme de Cambremer, however, the reader must recognize that Marcel quickly moves from seeing to understanding. By replaying the scene through the lens of his own experience, Marcel demonstrates his capacity to interpret the scene between Charlus and Morel. It is of note that he compares his “reading” of the scene to police surveillance: “la hauteur avec laquelle M. de Charlus avait toisé le violoniste […] eut été reconnue par les trois quarts des gens du monde, […] non pas par le préfet de police qui, quelques années plus tard, le faisait surveiller” (1406). The use of the verb “toiser” recalls the gaze Marcel himself had miscategorized earlier as potentially criminal when he was its object. This movement makes the introduction of male prostitution into the *Recherche* an opportunity to complicate the relationship between a work of art’s use of a subject and the material reality of that subject.\n\nThe first step in the practice of revelation is the replacement of one thing by its opposite. While imagining the opposite may lead to an imperfect reading, at least it is preferable not being able to understand what one sees. On the train, Marcel imagines an unlikely scenario in which Charlus had made Morel’s acquaintance through Albertine, then he reverses his reading of the situation: “M. de Charlus ne connaissait pas le moins du monde Morel, ni Morel M. de Charlus.” What this first opposition makes immediately visible is the function of money in a society that\n\n\\(^{11}\\) Canler’s book reports on his findings over the course of his career as the chief of the detective division (the *Service de Sûreté*) under the Second Empire. Half the book is devoted to “the relationships between blackmailers and ‘antiphysicals,’ as he termed men who had sex with other men” (Peniston 22). Carlier, the chief of the vice squad (the *Service des moeurs*) responsible for the regulation of prostitution, also “focused half his book on prostitution to the sexual commerce between working-class boys and middle class men” (24).\nMarcel is only beginning to understand: “En tout cas l’offre des cinq cents francs avait dû remplacer pour Morel l’absence de relations antérieures” (1406). Charlus’ offer of payment replaces (and, as we shall see later, paradoxically excludes) the prior laws of social encounters in which personal or professional relationships depended on a common past, shared interests, or identity of class. Once this is clear to Marcel, he is able to recognize this as the destabilizing power formerly ascribed to heterosexual prostitution. It is only then, after reminding himself what Charlus’ gaze implies, that he is able to replace the female prostitute with its analogue/other, Morel.\n\nThe woman in the street gives way to a body that seems to code clearly as masculine, to the extent that Charlus already views the young man with an eye for the masochism that will be fully revealed in the brothel scene: “M. Charlus vit avec ravissement ce geste autoritaire et viril […] avec une fermeté et une souplesse précoces qui donnait à cet adolescent encore imberbe l’air d’un jeune David capable d’assumer un combat contre Goliath” (1407). And yet the masculinity that Charlus reads on his body is denied by the underlying truth of the prostitutional economy: the Baron is safe in assuming that the young man will, in the public space of the train station, play the “passive” (i.e. feminine) role in the sense that, given the social and financial disproportionality of the two men, Morel has little basis on which to refuse the engagement made entirely on Charlus’ terms.12\n\nJust as it will later in the brothel scene, the exaggerated visibility of the capital that erupts into the scene indicates that something else is at play, something other than the Baron’s excessive generosity. The offer of five hundred francs is five times what the Prince de\n\n12 While this initial stability of their unequal power dynamic, of course, does not last, the expectation would remain a constant whenever Morel and Charlus appeared together in public: “… souvent Charlie, même devant tous les fidèles, avait l’air irrité au lieu de paraître toujours heureux et soumis, comme eût souhaité le baron…” (emphasis mine).\nGuermantes will pay Morel later for one night with him, and fifty times the average price of “une passe” in the average male brothel (Revernin). I would like to suggest that the elevated price is the sign of a shift in what will suffice to define one arriviste from another, to distinguish an artist from a prostitute. In the absence of physical sexual difference, the gendering of class difference becomes more apparent. While, as a prostitute, Morel will accept the Baron’s money, when he tries to distinguish himself as an artist later in the novel, the feminized financial and social position that their relationship traces onto him will become unbearable.\n\nThe presence of Morel, as a male prostitute, in Proust’s notes dates from 1909: he is part of the work even before Albertine, the hero’s main love interest. Francine Goujon, in her study of Proust’s manuscripts, points out the paradox of Morel expressed by a note in the margin of the author’s workbook: “Les tantes ne plaisent pas aux tantes seul avantage de Morel/ la plus grande tante” (95). Morel is thus the opposite of “une tante,” in that he pleases Charlus, “la tante de Frankfurt,” a woman in a man’s body... but, at the same time, Proust says, he is the very embodiment of a “tante.” How is this possible? In the context of prostitution, this is not a contradiction. Morel must consciously decide to take advantage of his masculine appearance, which makes him appeal to Charlus; in so doing, he demonstrates his ability to manipulate the codes surrounding the word “tante” in its application in a bourgeois setting. However, the word also belongs, as Proust would have known, to the lower register of working-class slang. Given his origins in the working class, and his apparent familiarity with the urban homosexual subculture and both sides of the law, Morel is a “tante” based on the use of the term as it would appear in Canler’s categorization: “men who had acquired same-sex sexual habits while in prison. […] Most of the tantes reverted to heterosexuality once they regained their freedom, but some joined the professional blackmailers […] in an attempt to turn their acquired habits into\nprofits” (Peniston 28). Thus, for Proust, Morel can be both entirely masculine, and occupy a feminized economic position. Furthermore, this position would feel, to him, like imprisonment.\n\nCharlus’ condescending gaze reinscribes the social distance between the two men typical of a homosexual prostitutional relationship. The majority of the arrests of same-sex couples during the Third Republic suggest a trend toward more egalitarian relationships between men of similar age and class-origin; however, some cross-class couples would have resulted from daily interaction, exemplified in *La recherche* by Charlus’ relationship with Jupien. But generally, according to Peniston, there was a marked decline in the “Ancient Greek” model – older man who plays the “active” role with a younger “passive” man – except in cases of prostitution. “Because the elites frequently sought out working-class men, and because they also maintained a distance from this sexual underground, they were undoubtedly offering money or gifts in exchange for sexual favors” (6). Charlus and Morel will never be able to “read” each other perfectly, given the distance between the contexts from which they perceive the same exchange of money and sexual favors.\n\nDue in part to the prostitutional nature of their encounter, and in part to Charlus’ tenacious hold on the old feudal hierarchy, neither Charlus nor Morel are able to move past the early modern model, in which the “younger man, typically a boy between fifteen and eighteen, was the submissive partner, in a transitional state of sexual passivity, out of which he was expected to grow. In his twenties, he would become the active bisexual and in his thirties, the married man” (6). In fact, their relationship seems to be almost an exaggerated performance of this model, leading Marcel to remark to Albertine immediately following his observation of the two men’s encounter at the train station, that they seem to be actors playing a scene (*R*).\nIndeed, this kind of relationship was dramatized at the time by print media and fictional works, adding a spectacular layer to practices of homosexual prostitution that would have been visible generally only if one knew where to look. Not only is the 1907 “affaire Eulenbourg,” a legal battle between two German noblemen accused of sodomy, traced on to the relationship between Charlus and the military musician, as Antoine Compagnon has shown based on Proust’s correspondence. Another well-known example from the 1870’s is the trial of the Comte Charles-Eugène Le Bègue de Germiny, whose “public offense against decency” with Edmond-Pierre Chouard was sensationalized by the press: his arrest and the subsequent trial was covered by Le Gaulois, Le Petit Journal, Le Temps, Le Figaro, and La Gazette des Tribunaux. It was also recounted in the Goncourt journal, the same one that Proust inserted via pastiche into his own work. The term “Germinism,” used to mean sodomy or general same-sex sexual activity, appears in several slang dictionaries around the turn of the century. This “Charles-Eu…” may have served as an additional layer to the models for the character of Charlus, whose “germanisme,” is denounced by “les gens du monde” (2185-86), and called “charlisme” only a few pages prior (2170), increasing the parallel between the two noblemen.\n\nThe coverage of the Germiny case emphasized Chouard’s youth and impressionability: “According to La Gazette de Tribunaux, “he was almost a child, beardless, with a pale complexion and effeminate face.” Le Figaro also noticed “his almost infantile countenance” (Peniston 153). Charlus makes repeated references throughout their relationship to “Charlie” Morel’s youth and femininity, and remains as protective of him as he would “une jeune fille,” posing as his mentor (R). But even at the initial encounter at the train station, this is slightly undermined as the Narrator compares the Baron’s admiration to that for a child who is surprisingly mature for his age (1407). Like Charlus, Germiny was observed during his frequent\nuse of the public urinal, and charged with solicitation, and judged in the public eye for corrupting the young man. According to later reports, however, it was rather Chouard who took advantage of Germiny, playing up his innocent appearance in court, when in fact he was part of a group of young men with multiple records for offenses against decency.\n\nIn fact, this connection to either or both real events turned legend by the press is not even external to the passage. The Narrator, reflecting on Charlus’ expressed desire to hear some music that evening, equates what the hero has just seen with an unnamed true story: “…je commençais à trouver que les ‘reconnaissances’ exprimeraient au contraire une part importante de la vie, si on savait aller jusqu’au romanesque vrai, quand tout d’un coup j’eus un éclair et compris que j’avais été bien naïf” (1406, emphasis mine). Here, being familiar with sensational commercial writing, le romanesque vrai—the kind of writing that had been codified in the previous century as the kind of metaphorical “prostitution” that men were seen to engage in—is placed in opposition to naïveté. The Narrator, passing through faits divers, continually corrects his ignorance, now drawing for his reader a link between heterosexual prostitution, a lieu commun, and homosexual prostitution.\n\nAs for Morel, he quickly grows irritated with Charlus’ infantilization, but not his money. He turns to extortion and blackmail, the second crime most often committed by men with records for offenses to decency, and eventually will use his knowledge of the system of surveillance to avenge himself on Charlus, who he believed had reported his desertion. The system works for him, and he continues to use it. While Morel offers conflicting signs of a desire to \"grow out of\" the passive role of the early modern model, he remains firmly within the economy of homosexual prostitution, manipulating its stereotypes, even as he actively works to develop relationships with women.\nWhile it appears to be a change in behavior, Morel’s interactions with women are, in fact, not outside the economy of prostitution. His attention to Jupien’s niece is the product of his desire to climb the social ladder, then to play the hyper-masculine role of the Don Juan, then finally to move into an “active” role, not by his own merit, but by prostituting someone more passive than he:\n\nMorel avait à ce moment-là d’assez fortes crampes à la main et se voyait obligé d'envisager l'éventualité d'avoir à cesser le violon. Comme, en dehors de son art, il était d’une incompréhensible paresse, la nécessité de se faire entretenir s’imposait et il aimait mieux que ce fut par la nièce de Jupien que par M. de Charlus, cette combinaison lui offrant plus de liberté, et aussi un grand choix de femmes différentes, tant par les apprenties toujours nouvelles qu'il chargerait la nièce Jupien de lui débaucher que par les belles dames riches auxquelles il la prostituerait.\n\nMorel cannot imagine himself operating outside this economy of prostitution, where sex is nothing more than a means of acquiring capital. He hopes, at most, to change his position within it, which of course proves unsuitable to his fiancée. The same reenactment of prostitution also governs his eventual relationship with Albertine, for whom he procures young women, the same role that Jupien will fill for Charlus.\n\nEven when the reader learns in the final volume that he has “settled down” with a woman, it is not framed by love, but rather by the negation of this economy of prostitution. He takes up with a woman who, being stronger-willed than he, realized that the way to keep him to “une fidélité absolue” was to convince him that anything else would put him back into the passive prostituted position: “A défaut d’honneur et de désintéressement, sa ‘femme’ lui avait inculqué un certain respect humain, qui ne détestait pas d’aller jusqu'à la bravade et à\nl'ostentation que tout l'argent du monde lui était égal quand il lui était offert dans certaines conditions” (2196-97). While he is still arguably in a passive position, Morel has entered into a domestic economy, the kind that is valorized uniquely by its opposition to, via the rejection of, prostitution.\n\nThis raises two important questions. First, what is it about prostitution that poses such a threat to Morel? And second, if—as we saw in the initial scene between Morel and Marcel, the musician is similar to the hero in his artistic ambitions—what is the threat to art that prostitution represents for Proust?\n\n**Reading in the Brothel: the Proustian prostitutional economy**\n\nIn spite of the fact that the world in which Marcel circulates is largely that of the upper bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, we have now seen that Proust successfully incorporates representations of working-class homosexuality and the related practice of male prostitution into *La Recherche*. Having unpacked the scene at the train station, let us now turn to the famous brothel scene in the final volume, *Le Temps retrouvé*. Once again, Marcel’s surprise at what he encounters signals to the reader that a shift in the Proustian practice of revelation is at play.\n\nHaving spent some time in a sanatorium, Marcel returns to Paris in 1916. He has a chance encounter in the street with Charlus, who, we are told, had transformed one of his properties into a military hospital. Or so Marcel had previously been led to believe. The hero then wanders into one of the few businesses on a particular street to have survived the war’s financial strain. His reading of the place is a series of corrections, following the novel’s characteristic epistemological pattern.\nAfter observing it from afar, Marcel decides that the unusual business that he has stumbled upon must be a “lieu de rendez-vous des espions” (2219). Once he enters, ostensibly in order to satisfy his curiosity (and his thirst), he then concludes it is also the scene of a crime about to take place. In contrast with the opening scene of *Sodome et Gomorrhe*—in which Marcel, from his hiding place, overhears Charlus and Jupien’s having sex but sees nothing—from his place in an adjacent room in the hotel, the hero is able to both hear and see Charlus, chained to a bed, being whipped by a mariner-type man called Maurice. A few pages later, Marcel will learn the truth: the business he had entered is a male brothel (and sometimes hotel); it is the very hotel owned by Charlus, and managed by his former lover, Jupien.\n\nAt this point in the novel, homosexual relations should be far from unrecognizable to either Marcel or Proust’s reader. After reading the first six volumes, the reader would surely be familiar with the Narrator’s reliance on the nineteenth-century *dispositifs* used to communicate homosexuality: illness, spying, criminality. Yet the brothel scene receives significant critical attention for its overt exposure of alternative sexuality as a rather quotidian practice for many elite men.\n\nWhat is perhaps more queer in this scene, I am proposing, is, in fact, its unabashed depiction of homosexuality as a form of labor, one wage-earning choice, among others. What is surprising, to the point of eluding critical commentary, is this depiction of the naked economics of the working brothel in a novel that is predominantly about the production of pure art. And yet that the building stood out as a business, in compliance with the law, is, after all, what first attracted Marcel’s curiosity, his characteristic desire to see what was happening behind the curtains: “Derrière les volets clos de chaque fenêtre la lumière tamisée à cause des ordonnances\n\n---\n\n13 The first time Marcel sees Charlus, he is not sure whether he is insane or a criminal. This echoes Balzac’s portrayal of Vautrin, whose homosexuality is inseparable from his protean appearance.\nde police décelait pourtant un insouci complet de l’économie” (2219). Something about this place suggests a system of exchange that is simultaneously both within social norms and entirely “other” to the world outside its doors.\n\nThe “otherness” of this economy is signaled in a conversation among the brothel’s employees, one that Marcel almost walks away from, which would have excluded it from his experience on account of being comprised of working-class “banalités” (2220). Almost, but not quite. The inclusion of the workers’ conversation as a frame for the image of Charlus’ flagellation is, in fact, of prime importance in understanding not only the scene, but the larger problem that an author faces in what can be called a Proustian prostitutional economy. Marcel hears the men talking among themselves while they wait for Jupien to return with more chains for their client. In what is an almost impressionistic scene, an embedded artist’s view of laborers in a moment of leisure, the men smoke, roll dice, and talk casually about a friend. The absent man brags about being a pimp but, one worker says, he is actually in love and a dupe for giving his prostitute-lover five francs in spite of the fact that she, “une femme qui était en maison, qui gagnait plus que cinquante francs par jour,” is the wealthier of the two (2221). This banal story is doubly underlined in the narrative: first, through its elevation to “cette théorie de l’amour vénal,” and second by an older employee’s concern that it be overheard: Marcel is there waiting, and the window is open (2222).\n\nThe young man’s “théorie de l’amour vénal” essentially maintains that the path money takes in a sexual relationship exposes a one-directional expression of desire. Thus, the presence of capital in any amount—be it five or fifty francs—produces and maintains a power differential that makes it impossible to know whether sexual relations are an externally motivated form of labor or an expression of love, a genuine interior state. Just as other narrative keys are contained\nin other scenes in the novel that are glimpsed and then shuttled away from the open window, this theory, or what I am calling the prostitutional economy, extends beyond the dynamics of the particular relationship between one working class man and his lover.\n\nThe continuation of the prostitutional economy depends on its deniability. Charlus must know on some level that Jupien maintains the hotel purely to satisfy the old Baron’s desires; yet when Maurice abandons the fiction of his role as a hardened criminal and denies having stabbed a chatty old lady, Charlus’ pleasure dissipates, leaving nothing to connect him to the young men but his money. He thus quickly pays, and leaves, but does so as someone clearly unsatisfied by his visit (2231).\n\nRevealing the unexceptional nature of the labor that makes prostitution profitable risks exposing the fiction on which prostitution, and all other systems based on the exchangeability of seemingly universal units are built. This, of course, includes language. (That Marcel stumbles upon the brothel as a result of losing himself in a contemplation of the exchange value of narrative that *Arabian Nights* connotes is not insignificant. 14) The introduction of money means, for a prostitute, that he/she is being paid to disguise the truth of his/her person in order to take on the appearance of whatever the client wants to read on his/her body. The client, however, sees the introduction of money into the relationship as a guarantee that the body made available to him will represent the truth of the individual. The prostitutional economy is thus not only the law of the world of fiction, it is also the unstable economy of metaphor, and of language itself, in which the meaning of any given sign is necessarily exterior to the object itself.\n\n---\n\n14 The exchange economy proper to the fiction-based world of prostitution meets the discourse of criminality mapped on to homosexuality as Marcel decides to find out the nature of the illuminated scene going on behind the curtained windows: “Tout cela pourtant, dans cette nuit paisible et menacée, gardait une apparence de rêve, de conte, et c’est à la fois avec une fièreté de justicier et une volupté de poète que j’entrai délibérément dans l’hôtel” (2220).\nOn one hand, while Charlus acted with Jupien as if he were to be wise to the artifice of the role played by men like Maurice, on the other hand, he also insists in its perpetuation by relying on the mediating role of narrative. He says to Jupien, “Je ne voulais pas parler devant ce petit, qui est très gentil et fait de son mieux. Mais je ne le trouve pas assez brutal. Sa figure me plaît, mais il m’appelle crapule comme si c’était une leçon apprise” (2224). While Jupien will insist, before Charlus, that the men are hardened criminals, internally motivated to beat the aristocrat they find chained up, the Narrator will not maintain this fiction for his reader. Marcel once again overhears something surprising, this time from Maurice as he returns from Charlus’ room:\n\nLa porte se rouvrit sur le chauffeur qui était allé un instant prendre l’air. ‘Comment, c’est déjà fini? ça n’a pas été long,’ dit-il en apercevant Maurice qu’il croyait en train de frapper celui qu’on avait surnommé [...] L’Homme enchaîné. ‘Ce n’est pas long pour toi qui es allé prendre l’air,’ répondit Maurice [...] ‘Mais si tu étais obligé de taper à tour de bras comme moi pour cette chaleur! Si ce n’était pas les cinquante francs qu’il donne.\n\nThe drama of the brothel scene thus comes not from Marcel’s surprise at finding Charlus in a sexually charged scene (as was the case in the courtyard scene), but from the juxtaposition of a scene of private sexual desire with its fulfillment as a form of purely disinterested labor.\n\nIf the visibility of money reveals the distasteful truth that it is impossible to translate pleasure—the fulfillment of a desire for something that exceeds mere biological need—into labor costs, it gives the lie to assigning a monetary value, or even a concrete social status, to art. The source of the inequality between a prostitute and his or her client is the necessary difference between the two practices of writing and reading a given sign, be this the body (the prostitute’s property) or money (the client’s property). The brothel scene makes it apparent that a difference\nin economic standing in a relationship opens the door for the incongruity of meaning awarded to the common signs connecting the “writer” and the “reader.”\n\nIn her study on a Proustian “erotics of reading,” Colleen Lamos proposes that the author’s translation of Ruskin formed his understanding of an ideal reading practice. At first, this is proposed as the ability to enter into the writer’s mind, to penetrate the body of the text. Such a practice is reversed in La Recherche through the depiction of Morel, on more than one occasion, as a book. It would follow that once Morel’s behavior becomes “readable” (to Charlus, to Marcel, to the reader) as that of a prostitute, his text-like body would become available for penetration at will. This should reflect the ideal of reading: a skilled interpreter of signs could actually possess Morel, could understand him for once and for all.\n\nOf course, this will prove untenable. In the economy of prostitution in which Morel circulates, non-readability is not only an effect, but the originating condition of his prostitutional state. The fact that Morel’s body is pure surface is what allows him to reflect the other’s desire, which he does, performing whatever role will merit him payment. The Narrator, who has less “invested” in Morel than Charlus, and seems to have less at stake in knowing what he does, compares him to a book: “Il ressemblait à un vieux livre du moyen âge, plein d’erreurs, de traditions absurdes, d’obsénités, il était extraordinairement composite. […] En réalité, sa nature était vraiment comme un papier sur lequel on a fait tant de plis dans tous les sens qu’il est impossible de s’y retrouver” (1532-33). While generally, a composite nature is a positive aspect in the Proustian aesthetic, the errors, fragments and multiple re-workings that the Narrator sees on the surface of Morel make him into a textual space that is too cluttered and vulgar to penetrate. As a result, he affords the reader no new knowledge about himself, to way to find himself.\nIt is precisely at the moment of perceived availability of the prostituted body—that is, of recognizing Morel as part of an economy prostitution, which assigns a monetary value to the satisfaction of sexual desire—that any reading, any interpretation that goes beyond the surface, or any satisfaction becomes impossible. For example, the following describes this impenetrability one evening at the Verdurins:\n\n[Une indépendante fierté] existait de par le privilège de la race dans le visage si ouvert de ce Morel au cœur si fermé, ce visage paré de la grâce néo-hellénique qui fleurit aux basiliques champenoises. Malgré sa fierté factice, souvent, apercevant M. de Charlus au moment où il ne s’y attendait pas, il était gêné pour le petit clan, rougissait, baissait les yeux, au ravissement du baron qui voyait là tout un roman. (1553)\n\nHis exterior body appears available, “ouvert,” and suggestive to one who understands the language of ancient Greek pederasty; yet his interior remains unreadable, “fermé,” at least to Charlus, who fails to see what is readable on the surface, and projects a romance novel onto it. The fulfillment of the desire for a totalizing, subjugating knowledge, of which sexual desire is but an expression, is effectively deferred, even as it is suggested, by the all-too visible surface that Morel-as-book offers to his would-be readers.\n\nThus, it might be argued that it is precisely because capital is involved that prostitution does not allow “reading”: money, or its equivalent, cannot bring forth meaning from under the surface. As stated earlier, at the beginning of the scene at the train station, both men were operating within an economy of prostitution: “music” for money. But immediately, Charlus’ desire exceeds the modern capitalist exchange of “non-reproductive sex against money”: he projects a marriage model, or at least a feudal model onto it: “Voilà quelqu’un par qui j’aimerais être accompagné dans mes voyages et aidé dans mes affaires. Comme il simplifierait ma vie!”\n(1407). Later, he will suggest that Morel take one of his titles, or at least change his name to Charmel to reflect his connection to the “estate” provided by the Baron ( ), and will offer to adopt him, playing the role of (Heavenly) Father to Morel’s Tobias. What Charlus offers Morel, “his protégé,” is his “protection,” that is, the means to become more like him and ultimately, the means by which Morel would double him, completely understanding him, completely able to fulfill his desire.\n\nThe kind of relationship Charlus is looking for, and will fail to find with Morel, resembles the second model of ideal reading that Lamos considers. She shows that what Proust embraces in his reflection on Ruskin is an interpenetrability by which the reader, once emptied, allows the text to enter his mind, only to find that such a reading then allows the reader to enter the mind of the author. Charlus wants loyalty and companionship from his engagement with Morel. But sex is not excluded from this. He read in the authoritative gesture the potential that Morel might fulfill his desires to be the submissive partner in a dominant-submissive sexual relationship without having to be asked, or being compensated for it. Charlus wants the kind of reading relationship that Mlle de Vinteuil and her friend share in the scene at Montjouvain.\n\nThe kind of reciprocal relationship that leads to the fulfillment of desire by virtue of being known—which exceeds the realist model of mastery based on knowing—is only represented successfully by one couple in the book: Mlle Vinteuil and her friend. “Mais elle devina sans doute que son amie penserait qu’elle n’avait dit ces mots que pour la provoquer à lui répondre par certains autres qu’elle avait en effet le désir d’entendre, mais par discretion elle voulait lui laisser l’initiative de prononcer” ( ). Mlle Vinteuil knows that her friend understands her desire and will act to fulfill it, even though it means playing a sadistic role, made desirable only in its departure from her true, good, nature. And of course, the metaphor for this exchange\nof knowing the other, and having desire known, for being the voluntary subject of voyeurism, is reading (134). This reciprocal reading, and ideal sexual relationship, appears to be possible only in the absence of mediation of desire by capital.\n\nUnfortunately, the prostitutional economy is one that reproduces an impassable barrier of difference: the failure of the prostitute to truly satisfy the client’s desire points to the difference between producing signs as a kind of labor and producing signs as an expression of love. And yet it remains to be seen if this is entirely detrimental. In this section of the novel, the worker’s framing conversations are far from secondary: they make evident the fact that the public commonplace of exchange is inextricable from our understanding of the most private scene of desire, vulnerability, and humiliation. This makes Marcel’s visit to the male brothel an important event in the progression toward his decision to remove himself from public circulation in order to fully dedicate himself to writing.\n\nIndeed, when Marcel speaks to Jupien about the brothel, we see that the distance between sex and writing, between brothel and publishing house, even for the high-society Proust, is—as it was for Balzac—not as wide as one might suspect. Jupien, speaking of his male brothel, says:\n\nSans doute, le directeur d’un établissement de ce genre, comme une grande cocotte, ne reçoit que les hommes, mais ils reçoivent des hommes marquants dans tous les genres et qui sont généralement, à situation égale, parmi les plus fins, les plus sensibles, les plus aimables de leur profession. Cette maison se transformerait vite, je vous l’assure, en un bureau d'esprit et une agence de nouvelles. (2235)\n\nThe brothel is a business that is both within bourgeois norms and exceptional to them, the labor done there may, at any moment, be transformed into the very business of professional writing.\nBetween Sodom and Gomorrah: Brute Genius\n\nWhile the hero of the Recherche is a fictionalized version of the author, the intensity with which he would dedicate his life to writing was entirely autobiographical. By 1921, Marcel Proust had become, in many respects, a successful writer. And yet his correspondence reveals a persistent concern with his reputation, and his desire to be read widely and considered a literary genius of lasting impact. Sodome et Gomorrhe I had just been published, and the literary world was talking about Proust’s daring subject and his erudite style. But he seemed driven to make an even wider impact. While he had recently been awarded the Prix Goncourt, Proust also tried to secure a place for himself in the Académie, and had friends advocate for him to be given the Légion d’honneur, just as, in his novel, Charlus would attempt to do for Morel. Clearly, he was torn between a desire to actively control his public image, and a fear of being seen as motivated by ambition rather than a pure dedication to art.\n\nThis dilemma is reflected directly in his approach to the object that most clearly reveals a writer’s work as the product of his labor: the manuscript. On one hand, Proust insisted that his manuscripts not be housed in public libraries, giving readers a chance to see his creative process. On the other hand, as Pyra Wise has demonstrated in her study of the writer’s correspondence, it was Proust himself, and not his editor, Gaston Gallimard, who proposed the idea of a luxury edition of A L’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs that would contain some pages from the notebooks from which the volume was prepared for publication, along with an engraving of a portrait of him done in 1891. Ironically, with the sale of these limited-number luxury editions of a portion of his work, which he anticipated would sell for three- to five hundred francs, Proust\n\n---\n\n\ncirculated an image of himself and his work as a commodity, making the figure of the author of the *Recherche* visible as both an attractive young man, and as the individual whose labor produced the work of literary art.\n\nThe same year, in an essay about literary genius entitled “A propos de Baudelaire,” Proust famously claims that Morel, the prostitute-musician, is, in the *Recherche*, the link between Sodom and Gomorrah. Many readers initially interpret this as a result of Morel’s bisexuality, his ability to please women and men because he knows what each sex wants from the other (*R PP*).\\(^\\text{17}\\) However, as I draw my study of prostitution to a close, I am proposing, instead, a connection between Proust’s circulation of his manuscript as a commodity, Marcel’s early critique of Morel for “revealing” his plan too early, and the author’s designation of the male prostitute as the character that connects Sodom and Gomorrah, two completely separate worlds. Should that title not ultimately belong to Marcel, who discovers that the paths leading in opposite directions, one to Swann’s and the other to the Guermante’s, ultimately end up meeting?\n\nThe citation that opens Proust’s volume entitled *Sodome et Gomorrhe* suggests that the two cities of the plain are divided along lines of sexual difference. However, as Elizabeth Ladenson has demonstrated, they prove to be, in both the essay and the *Recherche*, representative to two ways of knowing, only artificially separated by jealousy and desire for knowledge that excludes the mystery inherent in all true works of art. I am proposing here that we layer on to Ladenson’s reading of Sodom and Gomorrah the view of Morel as the embodiment of all that is potentially prostitutional about treating the professional artist as a mere laborer. In this way, Morel’s position as the link allows him to say that, while a lot of art may be\n\n\\(^{17}\\) For a summary and analysis of interpretations of Proust that reduce Sodom and Gomorrah to male and female homosexuality, respectively, see the first two chapters of Elizabeth Ladenson’s *Proust’s Lesbianism*. \nprostitutional, a mere imitation of others, and therefore “brutish,” continuing to resist the prostituted position that society would force upon the artist remains also the only thing capable of translating between the knowledge of a material reality and the understanding that comes from experiencing it through art.\n\nIn the essay, Proust is operating under the belief that the poets’ heroes are autobiographical. Vigny, he says, paints himself when writing about Samson, and when he says “La femme aura Gomorrhe et l’homme aura Sodome” (“La colère Samson, v. 78) he was writing out of jealousy: “c’est parce que l’amitié de Madame Dorval pour certaines femmes lui causait de la jalousie” (ApB 316). Proust believes Vigny was in error, temporarily blinded by jealousy, to exile Gomorrah, to separate the two sexes “en irréconciliables ennemis” (328). He contrasts him with Baudelaire, for whom the censured poems on lesbians were neither a spectacle added on to his work to sell it, nor a shameful subject to be excluded, but rather, were the most representative figure of him as a writer. When Proust then refers his reader to Morel as the one who plays the same role as Baudelaire’s narrator, he thus indicates a Morel who represents something about the creative process of the author, Proust himself. He means a Morel who, by his art, overcomes error and jealousy, not as spectacle or an effort to sell himself, nor out of shame for what he depicts. He means the Morel of the septet.\n\nTo explain what he means when he says that Baudelaire doesn’t separate the sexes the way Vigny does, Proust cites verses from “Lesbos”: in which the poem’s narrator claims to have been chosen “pour chanter le secret de ses vierges en fleurs” (v. 42). As as we have seen, Morel’s music does sing to his audience of the secrets of Balbec, site of certain “jeunes filles en fleurs,” not unlike the author. While this particular knowledge appears, on the surface, to be about women, at heart it is about learning to recognize, or re-recognize something that had\npreviously been misread, like the “bande” that is actually comprised of individual girls, or the disjunctive nature of the paths leading to the Swann’s and the Guermantes’. This is the epistemology of Proust’s Sodom (Lamos): the error-filled, errant path that leads to the moment of understanding.\n\nThe following line of the Baudelaire poem, “Et je fus dès l’enfance admis au noir mystère” (v. 43) reverses the telling of the secret. The narrator is included in the dark “mystère” that is beyond enlightened articulation. Now, given the era, given Proust, given Baudelaire, given Freud, it is very likely that this “mystère” can be interpreted as the darkness of the female sex, the Symbolic mother, etc. However, let us imagine momentarily that this “mystère” is not about what separates the two sexes, or what happens in the dark when they get together. What if it were purely about the production of art? Then the difference between Sodom and Gomorrah would be a difference in epistemology, and not biology. The “mystère” into which the baudelairian narrator is admitted would be the “génie” beyond that which can be executed and analyzed simply as “talent.”\n\nGenius is revealed in the production of art purely for the reason that it translates this “mystère” without losing any of its opacity. Only during the Vinteuil septet does Morel, like Baudelaire, expresses a transmissible knowledge that yet exceeds language. And this is the epistemology of Gomorrah. Should the artist reveal, in his work, more of his labor as a self-promoting artist than is befitting a grand auteur, he risks harming his image as a genius. “Ce qui est compréhensible chez Charles Morel reste profondément mystérieux chez l’auteur des Fleurs du mal” (ApB 329). What remains intriguing about Baudelaire is vulgarly laid bare about Morel. This exceeds any particular sexual ambiguity or bisexual tendencies, even if those are expressly stated for the violinist and only hinted at vis-à-vis the poet. What is altogether too apparent in\nMorel, what makes him “a brute” is his prostitutional status: his “non-readability” is only too readable as the product of trying to stay emotionally separate, to gain from reflecting the other’s desire.\n\nAnd yet, Morel is not imprisoned by his brutishness. During the septet, Morel’s skill as a musician astonishes the Narrator by giving the audience direct access to the mind of the composer. When he plays the Vinteuil septet, he gives without expecting anything in return. He thus succeeds at escaping, if only momentarily, the prostitutional economy. He exceeds, without negating, all the terms of the definition of prostitution cited above. He is both active, the master of his technique, and passive, expressing with his body an other’s desire. He performs both roles without a mind to profit. Since he has no idea what value the music he plays will have for each listener, he can’t project or inflate its value the way he did with the photograph of Odette. He allows art to enter him, and allows his listener to enter art: there is, through the mediation of his body, reciprocal penetration. And this penetration is not exclusive of reproduction because it allows for communion with the dead, and a perpetuation of the artist in the new, separate body of the performance. It is this sort of translation that gives his listener access to a previously unknown land inside himself, his own Gomorrah.\n\nAs such, his skill as a musician puts him on par with Mlle de Vinteuil’s friend, the one who transcribed Vinteuil’s manuscripts and made his music readable to musicians. It is not insignificant that Mlle de Vinteuil and her friend are the couple that Marcel sees through the window at Montjouvain: together, they show the hero what is necessary for the satisfaction of desire: intimate knowledge of the other without mastery over her. By closing the shutters, they keep the actual execution of the role mysterious. And yet it is Morel, and not Mlle de Vinteuil’s friend who Proust identifies as the link between Sodom and Gomorrah. Why?\nThey are, perhaps, too self-contained. Morel’s talent as a musician is not distinct from his existence in the novel as a prostitute: “D’ailleurs, à ces œuvres, tout autant que les relations de Mlle Vinteuil avec son amie, avaient été utiles celles du baron avec Charlie, sorte de chemin de traverse, de raccourci, grâce auquel le monde allait rejoindre ces œuvres sans le détour, sinon d’une incompréhension qui persistait longtemps, du moins d’une ignorance totale qui eût pu durer des années” (). The fact that Morel was dependent on Charlus for his introduction into the world suggests that, to a certain extent, it is helpful for an artist to be pushed by those who support him to define himself, to challenge himself to produce new kinds of art. Thus, an artistic performance that arose from a venal encounter outside a train traveling in the inverse direction can thus be seen as an instance of prostitution that will ultimately serve to put the reader of a work of art, say, perhaps, the *Recherche*, on the right path.\n\nOver the course of becoming the Narrator, Marcel proves his own independence from Charlus, and the feudal, but also prostitutonal economy. He successfully completes what Deleuze calls his “apprenticeship,” by deciding to write for himself, not as a means of procuring support. In the aesthetic treatise that makes up the final part of *Le Temps retrouvé*, Marcel proposes a work that retains a certain “mystère,” the quality that made the author of *La Recherche* admire Baudelaire’s narrator. The effect of this “mystère” is two-fold. First, it must be universal enough to pose as a reflective surface on to which the specific, individual reader has the possibility of projecting her desire. Moreover, this surface must be able to offer the reader the work of finding herself, of satisfying her desire to know what is beyond the norm (connecting her to Sodom), even while it troubles this object’s very knowability (connecting her to Gomorrah). Second, just as Morel’s interpretation of Vinteuil’s music preserves the life of the artist, so will the reader of the Narrator’s imagined book.\nThe “mystère” that is essential to the work connecting Sodom and Gomorrah also connects the past, and that which has passed away, to the eternal present of art. By resurrecting not only the Narrator’s entire life, but that of all those around him, by making the fictional account precise enough to seem real, but separate enough from history to be eternal, the book the Narrator imagines La Recherche to be is “médiumnimique,” in the same way as Morel’s music, in spite of the violinist’s prostituted status.\n\nProust’s own anxiety over the control of his image as a literary genius thus appears assuaged by Marcel’s relationship with Morel. Indeed, Marcel is more like Morel than he would like to admit. This is initially suggested by the similarity of the names, Marcel and Morel. The violinist was originally to be named Saintois, which is not far from the name of the hero in his first attempt at a novel, Jean Santeuil. Proust changed his name to Charles Morel, Goujon speculates, around the time that Proust was determining how important a role this character would play. The similarity of the names gains more significance in light of the prostitute and the hero’s similar progression toward a career as an artist. However, if Marcel seems to insist on his superiority to the musician out of a concern that he, like Morel, might be seen in a prostitutional position as a reader and writer, it is up to Proust’s reader to insist that he is not.\n\nThe impact on the reader, and not the status of the author, becomes the ultimate measure of the modernist work’s artistic value. There is an anxiety throughout the Recherche that the Narrator’s art might be just as “vulgar” as Morel. Each has been seen to pass through a stage of imitating Bergotte, and then write something told to him by Charlus, even though it may have been beyond his understanding at the time: Morel publishes the attacks on Mme de Mole; Marcel will write the story of Charles Swann and Odette, which he presumably learns from Charlus.\n\nWhat separates the Narrator’s pastiche of the Goncourt’s journal from Morel’s “burlesque”\nImitation of Charlus is the subtle, but vital, difference of the reader’s recognition. The culturally literate reader that Marcel addresses preserves the value of a work that is able to surpass and transform the author’s acquired cultural education, whereas Morel could only imitate it.\n\nSituated as he is in the wake of the century’s compilation of reading prostitutes, Morel thus demonstrates for Marcel (and Proust’s readers) that the difference between the published author and the circulating prostitute is less a question of exchange value or sexual deviance, than it is of cultural literacy: Morel’s artistic impact is ultimately limited by his inability to move beyond what Proust’s work depicts as a flawed practice of reading. Marcel’s, the reader of the *Recherche* will surely conclude, will not be.\nCONCLUSION: WRITING THE PROSTITUTED BODY (OF WORK)\n\nAccording to controversial French feminist writer Elisabeth Badinter, prostitutes today remain problematically denied any narrative authority over what prostitution means for those who practice it. In her critique of the decision made by the Assemblée nationale on December 4, 2013 to criminalize the demand side of prostitution, Badinter stated: “Je regrette qu'on n'entende pas davantage les prostituées. Elles seules sont habilitées à parler. Mais quand l'une affirme: ‘Je le fais librement,’ on dit qu'elle ment et qu'elle couvre son proxénète.” The “on” here refers to feminists who accuse the pimps profiting from prostitution of ventriloquizing through these women’s bodies. This is a rather foucauldian argument: the implication is that claiming that sex work is a choice is a prostitute’s only possible expression of subjectivity in a repressive power structure. In her critique of this, Badinter is, in turn, essentially accusing those feminists of “protectionism,” of ventriloquizing prostitutes by denying them the right to speak outside the discourse of victimization authorized by the abolitionist agenda: “Ce sont les seuls êtres humains qui n'ont pas le droit à la parole.”\n\nHaving arrived here, at the end of a project the goal of which was to examine power grabs effected by those appearing to giving voice to the marginal, I must point out that Badinter, too, is appropriating the prostitute’s language (or rather, her silence): both the negation of the words “je le fais librement,” and the lack of any other legitimate “parole.” She does so to supplement her own position in support of making prostitution a legal, regulated profession. And she points to their silence as proof of her authority to speak as a public figure. Thus, while Badinter may truly want to defend the right of prostitutes to speak for themselves, her statement\n\nin fact has the opposite discursive effect. It reproduces the ventriloquizing gesture that she and her counterparts both sought to critique. By calling on prostitutes to speak up, Badinter implies that their words will confirm her position. She thereby erases her own privileged position, and the affirmation of her authority, behind the prostituted bodies that she would make speak. In the political and literary spheres in which Badinter seeks to circulate, inscribed by a set of authorized—even if contradicting—discourses, a prostitute’s speech only becomes legible or audible when it reproduces existing authority.\n\nBadinter’s rhetorical move seems uncannily familiar to those made by several of nineteenth-century French authors and slang dictionary editors that we have studied in the preceding chapters. Consider Edmond de Goncourt’s claim, for example, that “le peuple” had a right to the novel, when his erudite writing style served to clearly distinguish his superiority to the real-life Elisas and Germinies. I thus conclude that we cannot fully understand the figure of the professional, literary intellectual as both a public authority and a star-like object of public desire—the figure that came to be dominant in French society during the nineteenth-century and remained so through the twentieth century—unless we examine the gendering of the literary intellectual as male, a process that includes (but is by no means limited to) the construction of the literary profession in opposition to the feminized position of labor in public circulation represented by prostitution.\n\nWhat our study here has revealed are but some of the powerful—qua invisible—effects of masking the production of an authority figure with the body (or voice) of a prostituted one, in the decades between Balzac to Proust. By using the prostitute’s narrative in order to defend their own right to free speech, by defining art as an exceptional commodity intended for circulation within a limited, culturally elite class of consumers, nineteenth-century bourgeois male authors\neffectively aligned the distinction of high and low forms of art with gender difference. The\nnotion that feminized, working-class representations of reality simply do not carry the same\ncreative authority was simultaneously produced by the writers seeking to define the literary\ncanon, naturalized by the fictions pairing the prostitute with the inferior writer, and applied to\njustify those fictions’ authors’ position within this new canon, and within the literary\nmarketplace where cultural capital was converted into economic capital.\n\nLet us now briefly return to the shifting notions of authority within the print marketplace\nthat the figure of the prostitute communicated: let us remember that this figure was created by\nmale writers who were in the process of defining themselves in a new political and economic\nstructure, and defining their profession through their practices of what we only now consider to\nbe the three general, overlapping literary style trends in the history of the long nineteenth\ncentury: romanticism, realism, and modernism.\n\nFor Balzac, at work simultaneously on Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes and\nIllusions perdues during the technological and financial revolutions that would radically alter the\nconsumption of literature, capitalism meant the inevitable devaluation of cultural capital. The\ncourtisane represented the illusion of education and style that could mask the absence of\nauthentic inner nobility, or genius. Esther and Lucien are both the true novelist’s illegitimate\n“other,” circulating on the power of sexual and narrative desire alone, rather than the authority of\na disinterested commitment to art. Similarly, in Dumas fils’ début novel, the anxiety surrounding\nthe loss of control of financial capital (personal property) is translated into the discourse of\npublic hygiene. As liquid assets—the display of which was previously seen as dirty, immoral and\nbase—were gradually becoming the sign of cultural authority, La Dame aux camélïas renders the\nliterate courtisane and her passé Romantic lover subject to the narrator’s command over the\ncirculation of books, and Duval père’s command over the circulation of property and women. The representation of the source of contagion—physical and commercial desire—becomes a way to distinguish the legitimate valuation of genuine intellectual property (produced by men such as l’Abbé Prévost and Alexandre Dumas fils) from the desire-driven inflation of books as collector’s items, as empty signs of cultural capital.\n\nThe slang dictionaries produced under the Second Empire, such as Delvau’s 1866 Dictionnaire de la langue verte, reflects the literary world’s turn to a scientific discourse at the height of the realist movement. Medical and judicial authority over prostitutes, and linguistic authority over the language they metonymically represented, served the interest of mastering the social uncertainty that resulted from the increasingly democratic access to education and wealth. Dictionary authors adopted a more or less legitimate posture of scientific authority as a style in an effort to create the effect of social distance between the real members of the working class and the artists who deigned study them (and re-present their language). By looking at a collection of the century’s dictionaries, which were consistently produced as an object of bourgeois entertainment, we saw how this authority was first an effect and then later a source of the commodification of the anxiety-provoking working-class other as spectacle.\n\nIn light of this spectacle, it becomes difficult to interpret the Naturalists’ depiction of common brothel workers as exclusively sympathetic to the injustices facing members of the working-class. Instead, we see a similar conscious performance of both scientific discourse and vulgar language as a means of aestheticizing an utterly unexceptional, commercialized body in the novels by the aristocratic Edmond de Goncourt, the future decadent J.-K. Huysmans, and even the more socially engaged Emile Zola. The use of the prostitute’s story to bring public attention to the aesthetic superiority of the Naturalist author and his ideal reader solidly positions\nthe *romans de la prostitution* as conscious reactions to the rapid expansion of the literary marketplace as rising literacy rates and declining book prices made novels an utterly unexceptional product. Their subjection of content to style marks the shift toward modernism as a product of anxieties surrounding post-revolutionary loss of class hierarchy.\n\nBy the end of the First World War, which brought the long nineteenth century to a close, the modernist author Marcel Proust introduces into the novel itself the author’s awareness that style—and not content—had officially become the sign of a great work of art. He effectively queers the trope of the prostituted artist through the character of Charles Morel, a musician and male prostitute, by eliminating the formerly stable marker of difference (gender) that helped distinguish the model of cultural illiteracy from the novel’s reader. Proust thereby introduces the world of the *roman montmartrois* into the field of high art, extending the purvey of the modern novel as genre beyond the realm of the culturally “unacceptable” into that of what is largely invisible from a perspective situated exclusively within the dominant, heteronormative bourgeois value system. If the Naturalists imagined an ideal elite reader who could potentially rescue the modern author from commodification by recognizing a work of art by the bourgeoisie’s distaste for its subject, Proust’s juxtaposition of Morel with the hero, Marcel, once again makes the cultural value of the work of art dependent on the artist. However, unlike the preexisting nobility that guaranteed the place of the artist for Balzac, Proust’s artist distinguishes himself from the prostituted one by his ability to legitimately accumulate cultural capital by learning from (rather than seeking to profit from) rereading the signs offered by one’s personal experience.\n\nThus, in the representations of prostitution produced at both ends of the century, a command of cultural capital—the ability to interpret and control the means of cultural reproductions—stands as the constant sign of the social elite and, moreover, proves as the one\nstable element able to resist the degradation of capitalist exchange. What happens over the course of a century’s worth of depictions of selling one’s self, in the novels published in the years from Balzac to Proust, traces the changes in the relationship between literature and capitalism, at least from the point of view of dominant bourgeois masculinity. In arguing this, I do not mean to remove gender or class from the focus of studies of representations of prostitution. To the contrary, I believe that these representations offer a point of entry into a broader study of exactly how the means of cultural reproduction are kept within the control of a small dominant elite, in spite of (and undermining the effect of) social movement outside the sphere of aesthetic representation.\n\nThe voice of this elite’s “other” is admittedly lacking in this dissertation, be this in the form of writing done by actual prostitutes or women writers making a place for themselves in a market that had been so effectively gendered masculine. While historians Laure Adler and Gabrielle Houbre both document the scarcity of accounts of prostitution from the perspective of the women themselves, such documents do exist. Additionally, some courtisanes such as Mme de Sabatier and Alice Regnault became central figures in literary circles and others, like la Mogador (Céleste Vénard, a.k.a. la Comtesse de Chabrillon) were even published authors. And I have left out perhaps the less-heard half of a two-sided conversation by failing to include women authors like George Sand, Gyp, Rachilde, and Colette who equally engaged the question of what it meant to be a public literary figure and a woman. However, it was a conscious decision to do so, since my question was about how representations of prostitution functioned as a metaphor in the process of defining art as the exclusive domain of a dominant male elite, the power of which would be naturalized and eternalized by the time Bourdieu came upon “distinction” as a new discovery.\nToday, almost a century has passed since readers first encountered Charlie Morel, the artistic prostitute and Proustian rewriting of Balzac’s prostituted artist, Lucien de Rubempré. What, then, has become of the metaphor? Micheal Lucy argues in *Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust* (2006), modernism witnessed a shift in the social authority with which one could speak about certain issues—including that of belonging to groups marginalized on the basis of exceeding heteronormativity. Given this, could writing about prostitution retain the distance from real sex work necessary to maintain its metaphorical power? One might expect the rhetorical device to have broken down over the course of the twentieth century as the control of literary representation of prostitution seemed to move out of the hands of clients in the publishing industry, and into those of the prostitutes themselves: “les intéressé(e)s prennent enfin la plume et livrent leur propre version,” writes journalist Macha Séry in a brief survey of the artistic representation of prostitution through the ages.²\n\nIndeed, Jean Genet includes an account of his experience as a prostitute in 1932 in his work blending fiction and autobiography, *Le journal d’un voleur* (1949). In a similar vein, a more recent account of the prostitute-turned-writer can be found in *Putain* (2001), a semi-autobiographical work by Canadian writer Nelly Arcane (a pseudonym) that is based on the author’s experience as an escort. And yet these were both marketed as “novels.” Together with many of the other autobiographically-based fictions and autofictions published in the years between them, *Le journal d’un voleur* and *Putain* suggest that the literary world has, in fact, seen little decline in the use of the prostituted figure to ventriloquize concerns that are predominantly\n\n---\n\naesthetic in nature, and the business (figuratively and literally) of writers whose education allies them soundly with a privileged, dominant class. \n\nConsider, for example, the first-person prostitute’s narrative entitled La Vie d’une prostituée (1948). This work, attributed to a writer known simply as “Marie-Thérèse,” offers the reader an inside view of the life of a woman who supported herself as a prostitute during the Second World War. However, the novel is intimately connected to the literary circle surrounding philisopher and literary giant Jean-Paul Sartre. Even at the time of its initial publication in Sartre’s journal, Les Temps modernes (issue 27, December 1947), La Vie d’une prostituée was considered to be the work of a writer in the existentialist’s circle. (A translation of it would appeared in the United States in 1966, with a forward by Simone de Beauvoir, however she denied authorship of it.)\n\nSartre’s own interest in the figure of the prostitute as an embodiment of a certain powerlessness over the potential effects of human liberty is evident in his 1946 play about the rape of an American prostitute, La P... respectueuse. In his essay Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur (also published in Les Temps modernes in 1947), Sartre writes that one of the main traits of the modern writer is his disgust for the exchangability of the sign, which he had inherited from the nineteenth-century novelists. \n\n---\n\n\n4 This argument appears in the essay, Qu’est-ce que la littérature ?, which appear, in parts, in Les Temps modernes in 1947, the same year as La Vie d’une prostituée.\nthe prostitute for her the emptiness of her gestures, a disgust that Huysmans and Goncourt had attributed to Marthe and Elisa. The narrator of La Vie d’une prostituée writes, similarly, “J'avais pris horreur de ce métier et j’étais dégoûtée de tous ces cochons qu’il faut sucer, branler, à qui il faut faire tant de trucs pour qu'ils jouissent” (qtd. in Séry).\n\nEven as a literary object, La Vie d’une prostituée seems to play with aspects of bibliophilia and the commodification of the author’s labor that had occupied nineteenth-century authors of romans de la prostitution as well as Proust (aspects that I have discussed in Chapters Four and Five). The narrative by “Marie-Thérèse” published in Les Temps modernes appeared in an expanded version in 1948: the book, published clandestinely, in a small print-run of 1550 copies, featured “as a frontispiece, a facsimile of a page of the original handwritten manuscript.” It was reissued and censored at least six times in the decades following its initial publication. Whether the inclusion of the manuscript constitutes a fetishizing of the author, and whether the publication practices sought censorship in an effort to increase desirability (as I have proposed in the case of Proust and Huysmans) are questions for another study. However what is clear in the mystery surrounding the publication of La Vie d’une prostituée is that as long as an author’s body of work circulates in a physical form, beyond the author’s control, there seems to be a concern with the tension between authenticity and the ability (or desire) to circulate publicly.\n\nThis tension has has clearly continued to correlate publication with received ideas about prostitution, even as the figure of the public intellectual appears to have lost the star-like aura enjoyed by writers like Sartre, and even as the figure of the prostitute moved from the margins of French society to the margins of a global economy. It is possible to see in controversial Michel Houellebecq’s defense of sexual tourism a certain amount of identification between his own\n\n---\n\nwork as an author and the Thai prostitutes he depicted in his novel *Plateforme* (2001). In a 2010 interview published in *The Paris Review*, the interviewer asks him what he thinks about prostitution. He replies, “I’m all for prostitution. [...] Because everybody wins. It doesn’t interest me personally, but I think it’s a good thing. A lot of British and Americans pay for it. They’re happy. The girls are happy. They make a lot of money.” The interviewer tries to bring up the victimization of such women, but Houellebecq dismisses her point curtly. Permit me to reach into the autobiographical for an explanation. Elsewhere in the interview, Houellebecq discusses his relationship to the now-familiar tension between his desire for canonization and his distaste for venality. He places himself in the lineage of realist writers like Balzac, then explains that he prefers to not have to actively promote his work. He thus admits to relishing the media attention he gained from the critical outrage at his depictions of sex in *Particules élémentaires* (1996) because it resulted in sales that earned him enough money to quit working as a computer programmer and write full time.\n\nIn light of this, it may seem that, of all the writers we have considered here, Houellebecq may, in fact, represent a culminating point in the practice of using representations of prostitution to “hack” the system of today’s literary marketplace in the interest of his own self-promotion. But only time will tell if his work will survive to see the transformation of his venality (not to mention his misogyny and racism) into a trace of literary genius. If, that is, literary scholars are able to survive the corporitzation of the intellectual sphere.\n\nThe use of references to prostitution to communicate disgust for the way capitalism sees to contaminate intellectual work is not restricted to nineteenth-century Paris. As I said in the Introduction, comparing the devaluing of one’s intellectual labor to the prostitution of one’s body persists in the public imagination, in the United States as well as in France. Richard Vedder,\neconomics professor at The Ohio State University (and University of Illinois alum), demonstrated this when he referred to universities as “intellectual prostitutes” for their willingness to “trade their principles for cash” (2). I would propose that Vedder’s identification as an economist, and as a man, contributed to his to his decision to use this metaphor. Such a comparison for humanities scholar would be even more uncomfortable, given the gendering of fields of study within academia that has taken place in the relatively short period of time that women have been admitted into the profession. Just as the gendering of the literary profession during the nineteenth century correlated with the rise of the novel to a position of economic prominence, a similar gendering, in reverse, is evident in the American academe today. The perceived value of the various kinds of intellectual work complicates Vedder’s condemnation of “intellectual prostitutes.” The humanites have become feminized, while STEM fields remain masculinized, and the disparity of economic capital that the state and the university allot to support research and education in each field appears correlated to this feminization. Plus ça change...\n\n6 “Academic Prostitution, California Style,” op. cit. in the Introduction.\nEPILOGUE: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MAISON CLOSE ON THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OPEN MARKET\n\nOver the past decade France has seen a sudden resurgence of popular interest in the figure of the nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute. In September 2015, the Musée d’Orsay opened the “first major show” of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, documents, and films depicting the world of prostitution, across the social spectrum. The public to whom the museum, and its extensive website, offers access to these representations is similarly diverse. The images of life in the maison close were indeed circulating, once again, on an open market... now, global in scale.1 The curators surely counted on the show’s appeal to the masses, given the international public’s growing fascination with this marginalized figure who was, ironically, so central to the nineteenth-century French collective imagination. Responses to the show constitute a microcosm of the various approaches to representing prostitution as well as the intersection of the issues involved in doing so that we have considered here: art, labor, censorship, social reality and the power of collective fantasy. The title of one review romanticizes the exhibit, focusing its reader on the demi-monde2; another takes a more naturalist spin, focusing on prostitution as a profession.3 Yet another traces the\n\n---\n\n\nwriting about prostitutes—the *pornei-graphy* of the works—back on to the “author” of the exhibit, suggesting that the museum’s president was consciously aware of the commercial value in bringing together works of art considered scandalous in nature.⁴\n\nIndeed, by juxtaposing representations of sexually available women produced for private consumption with works by canonical artists, the exhibit simultaneously breaks downs and reinscribes the division between high art and pornography that nineteenth-century editors, authors and state censors wished to see applied to the slang dictionaries and works of literature discussed in the preceding chapters of this dissertation. Not only does the website issue the following warning to potential visitors, in bold, “Please note that some of the pieces presented in the exhibition may be shocking to some visitors (particularly children).”⁵ The layout of the exhibit itself includes two “secret” rooms that are off-limits to minors in attendance due to the categorization of the materials displayed—some of the photographs and early films—as explicitly pornographic.\n\nHowever, in my personal experience as the mother of a three-year old and a scholar whose books often have images of prostitutes on the front, children are far more comfortable with the sight of nudity than the adults who have internalized the messages about—and conveyed\n\n---\n\n\n⁵ In a review of the show for Forbes online, Cecilia Rodriguez writes, “Great Expectations surround the exhibition *Splendor and Misery: Pictures of Prostitution, 1850-1910* at the Musée d’Orsay [....] First, because of the bold and decadent nature of the theme and the works exhibited. It’s another “Shocking Exhibition” from Guy Cogeval, the museum’s president who was also behind a male nude show two years ago that was a blockbuster – just as this one may well be.” *Forbes/Lifestyle*, Sept. 23, 2015. \n\nby—the public exposure of a more or less unclothed female body. As I have demonstrated through my close readings of the works selected for this project, representations of prostitution are rarely exclusively (if at all) about sex or those having it. I suspect that there is something else at play in the current public fascination with nineteenth-century Parisian prostitution, in the public woman at the symbolic heart of European culture during the rise of modern consumer capitalism.\n\nScholarly attention to the fictional representations as well as the elusive experience of the real women (and men) whose lives inspired them has remained somewhat constant in France since the late 1970s. Historian Alain Corbin’s foundational work, Les Filles de noce was first published in 1979, and has been rereleased every decade since. However, the choice of Zola’s Nana as one of the texts for the 2009 concours d’agrégation in literature is evidence of the subject’s importance in a slightly broader public imagination. This choice followed the publication of the anthology by the distinguished Robert Laffont press, Un Joli monde, romans de la prostitution (2008), and that of Le livre des courtisanes: Archives secrètes de la police de moeurs, 1861-1876 (2006), edited by Gabrielle Houbre. The marketability of these two books in the popular domain is evidence of an increased fascination with the representation of “the golden age of prostitution” in both fiction and the archive.\n\nIn the years immediately following these admittedly more scholarly products, two period dramas appeared, the popular appeal of which it would be impossible to deny: a film and a mini-series came out, both offering twenty-first century depictions of the “behind the scenes” life of the women living and working in upscale brothels in the first few decades of the Third Republic. Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello had started working on his film, L’Apollonide, souvenirs d’une maison close (2011) in 2007, after discovering historian Laure Adler’s study La vie quotidienne\nDans les maisons closes, 1830-1930 (first published in 1990, and currently in its sixth edition). L’Apollonide caught the attention of critics at Cannes: it received eight nominations for César awards. Television producer Jacques Ouaniche’s series, Maison Close had a record-setting average of one million viewers when season one first aired on Canal+ in 2010.\n\nIt is undeniable that this return to the nineteenth-century imaginary—and the imaginary return to the nineteenth century—coincided with renewed political attention to sex work in an increasingly global economy. In 2010, deputy Chantal Brunel proposed a law to reopen the maisons closes, which had been illegal since 1946, following the passing of the Marthe Richard law. However, the conservative legislation aiming to criminalize solicitation in 2003 was part of a series of laws aimed primarily at reducing the visibility of the poor and disenfranchised. Other parts of the bill—written by a certain Nicolas Sarkozy, who was, at that time, Interior Minister—criminalized organized systems of beggars as well as “aggressive” begging, established a two-month prison sentence as a penalty for youths caught loitering in the stairwells or entrances of apartment blocks, and made it a punishable offense to insult the French flag or boo the national anthem. Women making a living as sex workers were but one face of a larger problem facing the conservative government officials who viewed increasing European and global migration as a threat to the already-overextended French economy, job market, and health care system. While the practice of prostitution had become radically different, the figure of the prostitute seems to have continued to function as the embodiment of collective social anxieties. But what exactly are these today? Do they extend, as before, past the threat of sexually transgressive bodies?\n\nIn her review of the Musée d’Orsay show, American ex-pat journalist Sarah Moroz offers her own reading of the threats embodied in two paintings: Jean Béraud’s La Proposition (The Proposition, 1885) and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress, 1880).\nHaving opened her article by framing the show in Amnesty International’s endorsement of “decriminalizing the global sex trade” in order to better “protect the women whose line of work it is,” she views the paintings with a sympathy for the women depicted that maps a certain disgust for their clients onto the canvases. She describes the gazes of the embedded male viewers as “predatory,” “leering,” and “so sharply invasive as to be bone chilling.” While I am not saying that she is misreading the individual works, the language she uses suggests a level of identification with the women in the paintings that—in combination with her overall assessment of the exhibit as showing the quotidian nature of such prosti\ntutional exchanges—is perhaps excessive, if not unfounded.\n\nI cannot help but feel that Moroz, like the authors whom I have discussed in this dissertation, sees the working-class prostitute as somehow representative of her own social position as a contemporary female freelance writer. She says, “Though the depictions of these women in paintings never exude outright desperation, their equanimity feels forced. [...] One can only imagine the daily presumptions and violations of civil decency women had to wrestle with, simply by virtue of being women in the public sphere.” Perhaps, however, it is only from my own standpoint as a feminist French scholar that those last few words, “women in the public sphere,” link this Paris-based journalist’s reading of images of prostitution to the history of gendering public written discourse.\n\nMoroz would not be alone in mapping the twenty-first-century writer’s experience onto the figure of the nineteenth-century prostitute. The press kit accompanying the film,\n\n---\n\n7 Moroz’s use of the phrase may not even be consciously evoking Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the public sphere as the locus of power over social and political discourse, and control of the representational systems as support for this power; it is all the more difficult to imagine that she could be alluding to the classic of feminist French cultural studies in the U.S., historian Joan Landes’ *Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution*, Cornell: Cornell UP, 1988.\nL’Apollonide, includes a conversation between the director, Bertrand Bonello, and Laure Adler. Bonello admits that “In truth, one could say that the character played by Noémie Lvovsky is me, the director, directing this brothel, she designs her sets, she asks the prefect for help the way I ask the CNC for money… and maybe you could consider that her client is my audience…” Of course, his comment seems to fall in line with a cinematic tradition that relates the actress to the prostitute, her desiring audience to the client, and the film maker to the one behind the scenes, pimping her out. However, it is significant that not only does he identify with the brothel madam, but that the character is played by Noémie Lvovsky, a screen-writer and film maker in her own right. Furthermore, Bonello articulates the reason for his identification with a female role by relating to his position of financial dependence on the French state: funding from the Centre nationale de cinématographie and the Ile-de-France region made up almost a third of the film’s budget. Clearly, the metaphor of prostitution for artistic production continues to resonate with artists who find in the referent a world with a complex economic hierarchy strikingly similar to the one around them.\n\nIn fact, if both Moroz’s and Bonello’s views of nineteenth-century prostitution transform it into a lens through which they inspect their own professions, one final close reading will demonstrate the extent to which the contemporary fascination with the subject may very well be functioning as an outlet for a much more broadly-felt anxiety about the global labor market in general. That the introductory sequence to the eight episodes of the first season of Maison close had an aesthetic and a soundtrack uncannily suggestive of the Mad Men opening sequence is one clue. But another trace of the show’s presentation of itself to its public, one more exclusive to the digital turn, offers a better one.\n\n---\n\nWhen *Maison close* débuted in 2010, the Canal+ server hosted a website giving detailed information about the show and its cast, including airing dates, stills from each episode, and behind-the-scenes interviews. The site originally had an elaborate introductory sequence, programmed in Flash (and unfortunately no longer enabled), that inadvertently demonstrated the social anxiety that made this show appeal to such a wide audience. The highly digitized “camera” occupied a first-person point of view that began with a glimpse of the brothel madam—a realistically animated version of the actress in the show—scrutinizing the viewer through an external door’s peep hole; the entire door then opens and the viewer is escorted into the lobby of the *Paradis*, a fictional upscale brothel in 1871 Paris. The camera’s gaze is that of a male client, panning a room full of alluring women who make eye contact with the viewer and pose seductively. Then, just as it looks as though the viewer is about to climb the main staircase, the camera operates a physically impossible move, flying straight up to the second floor, and spinning in mid-air to move onto the balcony where we meet the stern gaze of the brothel madam a second time. This time, the madam speaks to the viewer as if he/she was one of the brothel residents. The camera then takes the viewer through yet another door, behind which we see the same array of women, now in a state of repose, lacking the elegant costumes they had been wearing only moments before.\n\nThis virtual introduction effectively communicates the “upstairs, downstairs” drama that the show’s producers wanted to market, but the sex-change effected by the fly-up (making the viewer transform from brothel client to a brothel resident) highlights the role that technology plays in creating the illusion of sexual neutrality—or rather, ambiguity—in the modern consumer of digital media. In both of the positions occupied sequentially by the camera, the viewer’s gaze is returned, uncomfortably, by its object: a subject commodified by another’s sexual or\ncommercial desire. This object-subject confronts the desire to see with an expression critical of the viewer’s very presence. In the first half of the introductory sequence, the masculine gaze of masterful enjoyment of a spectacle is destabilized by the evaluating look of the house madam, and then the look of each woman who reduces the viewer to a means of personal gain. In the second half, the madam again offers a critical expression to the viewer who must then confront the reality that his/her role in the house is that of an employee (or servant), rather than a client: the criteria of the madam’s evaluation thus shift from detecting the ability to spend money to the ability to make money. All this to say that the show itself is eerily aware of its audience’s modern anxiety surrounding the unstable nature of relationship between consumers, owners and producers in today’s global labor market. For those watching, the show offers an equally uncomfortable view of the role we all play today as both laborers deprived of choice by the job market of an economy in perpetual crisis, and consumers of products that disguise oppressive, underpaid forced labor under the glittering allure of the fashion industry, among others.\n\nAnd this uncomfortable fascination and fascinating discomfort is what unites the “low” art of serialized television, the “high” art housed in the Musée d’Orsay, and the texts I have examined in this dissertation. I maintain that the current interest in the figure of the nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute is partly due to the fact that representations of these figures speak to our European/American contemporary anxieties related to not being able to say no to job offers in the current era of recession, unequal distribution of wealth, and outsourcing. However, it is also partly due to the fact that we live in a world dependent on the masking of feminized labor. This labor is masked, at times, in the legitimacy of commercial desire; at other times, it is hidden by the persistent taboo of unabashedly looking at, or talking about, sex. In yet another review of the Musée d’Orsay exhibit, an article entitled “Tourists Love Musée d'Orsay's 'Orgasmic'\nProstitution Exhibition,” the critic seems unsure who is more “juvenile”: the curators or the museum-goer whose comment about the show he ironically reproduces in his own title.\\(^9\\)\n\nIt is therefore of note that when critics of the exhibition, or modern screenwriters, or advocates of either regulatory or abolitionist legislation, focus the public’s attention on the sexuality that makes up the scandalous surface of the figures of the prostitute, they are continuing to fetishize the trope, thereby repeating the same reality-effacing violence of nineteenth-century realisms. I believe that this may be at least partly because so many of us are—like the bourgeois critics whose blindness to the truth about their own venality was the target of the Naturalist writers’ criticism—unwilling to part with the benefits of the colonizing, prostitutional subjection of a feminized labor force on which our first-world contemporary society is built.\n\nWe too may choose to focus on the dazzling surface of the courtisane, or the redemptive love story, in order to avoid seeing how similar the current desire to control illegal migrant labor (in Europe and the US) is to the nineteenth century's desire to regulate prostitutes. And by migrant labor, I mean both global sex trafficking both also the illegal practices from which fashion and service industries profit. We may want even less to confront the inevitability of the failure of First World economies to maintain control over the global flow of marginalized bodies: bodies that fall between stable categories of disciplined laborers and undisciplined threats to social order. An inevitability that is traced in the repeated failure of the slang dictionaries as well as the Bureau de moeurs.\n\n\\(^9\\) Brian Boucher seems to agree with other critics, particularly Harry Bellet of Le Monde, who accuse the museum of caring more about box office numbers than insightful curation, implying that this exhibit’s appeal was to the lowest common denominator in the museum-going public, one who would find “orgasmic” a humorous descriptor for an art show featuring representations of prostitutes. ArtNet News online, Oct. 16, 2015. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/prostitution-exhibition-musee-orsay-341147 Accessed on Nov. 8, 2015.\nFictionalized prostitution will continue to fascinate us, as it did the writers navigating the newly capitalist nineteenth-century literary marketplace. In the face of representations of prostitutes, we see collapsed the distance between our identification with the subject as a self, and our fear of her as a commodified other. On one hand, it thus speaks to us in our own position as “subject” to a global economy dominated by recession and uncertainty. And yet, on the other, the collapse of difference between ourselves and the prostitute’s clients and representors makes it impossible to look away from a reality that we would rather deny: the extent to which the satisfaction of our first-world commodified desires is entirely dependent on our nations' subjugation of a feminized working-class (international) other.\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nPrimary sources:\n\n\nCuisin, Pierre, Les Nymphes du Palais Royal, 1815\n\n\nDumas fils, Alexandre, La Dame aux camélias [1848],\n\n\nLittré, Emile, *Pathologies verbales, ou Lésions de certains mots dans le cours de leur usage.*\n\n\nSand, George, *Léone Léoni* [1835].\n\n\n**Historical and Sociological Studies of French Culture and Language:**\n\n\nCorbin, Alain, *Les Filles de noce.*\n\n---, *Le Miasme et la jonquille.*\n\n\nLiterary Criticism / Critical Theory:\n\n\nBeizer, Janet, *Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France*.\n\n\n**Contemporary Connections**\n\n\n*Trésor de la langue française informatisé.*\n\n\n"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":117424,"string":"117,424"}}},{"rowIdx":89,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"9a2ad90cd326cbc69ca90e01ac523c9c19d7a631"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"It has always been my contention that the circumambient pedagogical exposition of the entire science of metaphysics must be reinspired for a new interpretation.\n\nThe great Russian, Shiertieviev, while patently a curmudgeon amongst cogitators, seems, nevertheless, to faithfully intuit the necessity and the trend.\n\nI plan this summer to visit the great Smasha of ancient India the even more satisfying El Tel of Persia, and the almost equally erudite Sah Dah of Egypt. Then I shall feel quite justified in presenting my views to this miserably deluded world.\n\nConstraint, my young friends, is the unholy bludgeon smashing the new thought. If only I could free myself from all boundaries of time and space and from all limitations of place and purpose! Sometimes my poor weak corporate entity shivers under the very violence of my rationalization! There is a new mysticism— JJ but why mention that?...Yo: would not comprehend, and, therefore, it would be highly illogical and inconsequential for me to proceed.\n\nAtmosphere...ah atmosphere...the five-o'clock tea...the sweet-burning incense...the soft-lighted rendezvous in an ancient hostelry...the heavy-wooded groves where one might amble in secluded and exalted thought...the quiet, shaded porticoes of an isolated villa...How I miss them all in this raw land of grain and groan!\n\nAnd what do we encounter? Regimentation...convention...tradition! Like an out-Omared Khayyam, we bow to it all. The peripatetic spirit has moved off noiselessly like an evening mist. Professors ask me to inscribe concept in written word, to fix mood at the point of a pen. Better try to print the rampings of a strapless colt, or express in bar and circle the soundless symphony of the far-flung heavens!\n\nComrades! Sympathies! Ah, at what late hour will they soften life's cruelties? Some fair day, my young friends, I shall open your eyes to a new moral and religious synthesis. But hush! Tish! I must hide me to my study. Is not that a shallow perfection upon the too and hoo?\n\npride.\n(by Don Marquis)\n\nboss it is funny to me\nthe things that people get proud of\ni met a flea today\nwho was all hopped up\nwith self-importance\nhe said he had been\nup to the zoo and had hit\na lion you should have heard\nhim roar said the flea\nwhen i sank my tooth into him\nplenty of fleas have bit dogs\nbut i guess i am the only\nflea who ever licked a lion\nlittle follow\ni said to him\ndon't get proud\n\nprobably he never knew\nyou existed more than likely\nhe thought you were only\na measles breaking out on him\nboss i have known\nsome human beings who wore\njust as foolish as that flea\nthey thought they were heroic\nwhen they were only waders\nin the eyes of humanity\ntoo many creatures\nboth insects and humans\nestimate their own value\nby the amount of minor irritation\nthey are able to cause\nto greater personalities than themselves\n\narchy\n\n(--From Literary Digest; Jan. 25, 1936)"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":691,"string":"691"}}},{"rowIdx":90,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"23c326d3b64a3b2894bf53c60b4e56341cc7de7b"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"The DuBois Critical Writing Awards are presented by Sigma Tau Delta, Xi Mu Chapter, for outstanding critical writing on a literary subject. Kent State University sophomores, juniors, or seniors are eligible to compete for two cash awards: $50.00, first place; $25.00, second place. In addition to the financial awards, winning authors will be honored at the English Department Awards ceremony in the spring.\n\nTo enter the competition, please follow these steps:\n\n1. Complete the attached \"Author Information Sheet.\"\n\n2. Submit **only one critical essay.**\n\n3. Your name **must not** appear on the entry.\n\n4. Entries will NOT be returned.\n\n5. Please email your submission as an attachment to Sheri McMahon Administrative Assistant, smcmaho7@kent.edu. Please name it \"DuBois Award.\"\n\n**DEADLINE – Feb. 24, 2021 8:00am**"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":191,"string":"191"}}},{"rowIdx":91,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"d41895eacaee8995dfd1c817c1e1971f1e810237"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"A Case for Rhetorical Method: Criticism, Theory, and the Exchange of Jean Baudrillard\n\nBrian James Gogan\n\nDissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of\n\nDoctor of Philosophy\n\nIn\n\nEnglish\n\nBernice L. Hausman\nPaul V. Heilker\nKelly E. Pender\nKatrina M. Powell\n\nMarch 30, 2011\nBlacksburg, Virginia\n\nKeywords: Rhetoric, Method, Criticism, Theory, Jean Baudrillard\n\nCopyright 2011\nA Case for Rhetorical Method: Criticism, Theory, and the Exchange of Jean Baudrillard\n\nBrian James Gogan\n\nABSTRACT\n\nThis dissertation uses the case of Jean Baudrillard to argue that successful critics must consider rhetorical method as it relates to theory. Throughout this dissertation, I follow Edwin Black in using the term *rhetorical method* to describe the procedures a rhetor uses to guide composition. The project’s two main goals are, first, to demonstrate how rhetorical method can serve as a foundation for worthwhile criticism, and, second, to outline a Baudrillardian rhetoric. In order to meet these goals, I perform close readings of Baudrillard’s oeuvre alongside a wide range of sources, including critical writings, classical works, analogic photographs, contemporary texts, and recent obituaries.\n\nChapter one introduces my project and the concept of rhetorical method through an anecdote, which compares the later paintings of Andy Warhol to the writings of Jean Baudrillard. Next, I define rhetorical method and distinguish it from the concepts of critical method and rhetorical object. Then, I reveal the importance of rhetorical method in criticism by reviewing three cross-disciplinary interpretations of Baudrillardian rhetoric. I analyze each interpretation according to its argumentative strength, its treatment of rhetorical method, and its engagement with Baudrillard’s reputation as a cross-disciplinary, postmodern rhetor. I argue that rhetorical method asks critics to reconsider the foundations of their interpretive claims. To conclude, I analyze one of Baudrillard’s own essays that treats Warhol, assessing the degree to which Baudrillard critically engages with Warhol’s rhetorical method.\nChapter two demonstrates that understanding rhetorical method opens up new understandings of rhetors and their rhetoric, by critically engaging Jean Baudrillard’s dominant rhetorical method: *exchange*. Baudrillardian exchange radically revises the conventional rhetorical paradigm (to the exclusion of audience) and relies upon the perpetual movement between two agonistic theories of language: (1) the materialist theory—appearance, production, meaning-making; (2) the anti-materialist theory—disappearance, seduction, meaning-challenging. Baudrillard metaphorically describes exchange as a two-sided game and often embraces the anti-materialist theory of language in his writing and photography in order to challenge the materialist theory of language. After providing examples from his aphoristic writing and his analogic photography, I show how Baudrillard mobilizes disappearance as a move in service of his rhetorical method by analyzing one of his last works: *Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?* I argue that, in this text, Baudrillard’s rhetorical move of disappearance shifts in accordance with the posthumanist turn in thought, but his rhetorical method of exchange remains consistent with his earlier works.\n\nChapter three deploys exchange as a critical method by generalizing and extending this rhetorical method as an interpretive framework that can be applied to texts other than Baudrillard’s own. Specifically, I show how Isocrates’s *Antidosis* is successful in its creation of an ambivalent rhetorical space—a space that upends convention, dissolves logics, and ruptures values—and how James Frey’s *A Million Little Pieces* is unsuccessful. In sum, my analysis of these two texts, one classical and one controversial, considers the ability of each text and its surrounding paratexts to challenge the meaning-making system and break with convention. My analysis further positions Baudrillardian\nrhetoric as a sophistic rhetoric that offers recourse to rhetors, such as Isocrates or Frey, who momentarily occupy the weaker side of the argument. Yet beyond forwarding a strong counterargument, the attention that Baudrillardian exchange pays to value systems proves a framework that is particularly amenable to questions of the public good.\n\nChapter four offers a metacritical commentary on the use of Baudrillardian rhetoric as a critical method as well as on the construction of Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist. Focusing on the relationship between method and theory in rhetorical criticism, I argue that rhetorical criticism is a productive enterprise and that existing explanations of this enterprise are insufficient because they abandon method. To better explain the method and theory dynamic that produces rhetorical criticism, I turn to Baudrillard’s work on the model and the series in *The System of Objects*. After demonstrating method’s affinity with the model and theory’s affinity with the series, I argue that the distinction between the model and the series is a rhetorical distinction. With that distinction in mind, I offer a metacritical commentary about the ways in which rhetorical scholars have treated Baudrillard’s writing and constructed him as a rhetorical theorist. To conclude my discussion, I turn to Baudrillard’s own critical commentary about his rhetoric as it relates to his notion of the simulacrum. Analyzing his discussion of “the rhetoric of simulation” in *The Perfect Crime*, I argue that Baudrillard was indeed a rhetorical theorist in the most robust sense, since he engages with both theory and method.\n\nChapter five argues that critics should consider rhetorical method to be as important to rhetoric as ethos. To support this argument, I examine two instances of criticism which involved unflattering obituaries and their responses: Jonathan Kandell’s 2004 obituary of Jacques Derrida and Carlin Romano’s 2007 obituary of Jean\nBaudrillard. I, first, analyze these obituaries in accordance with a conventional understanding of rhetoric as representation and, second, in accordance with each theorist’s rhetorical method. While conventional responses to these obituaries could repudiate them for their negative tones and nasty messages, I contend that both theorists actually sanction these admittedly distasteful texts. In other words, the unconventional approaches of both rhetorical theorists to writing—namely, the Derridian *différance* and the Baudrillardian fatal strategies—seem to endorse the respective obituaries. I argue that these obituaries further suggest two new models of obituary writing, both of which are grounded in revised understandings of poststructuralist epideictic rhetoric: (1) a Derridian model that exposes the inadequacy of the contextual component of epideictic rhetoric; and, (2) A Baudrillardian model that revises the relationship between epideictic rhetoric and the value contemporary society places upon vitality.\n\nIn my conclusion, I propose a methodological definition of rhetoric: *Rhetoric is the meeting of two methods*. As I argue, this definition of rhetoric is not only grounded in the history of rhetorical studies but it also possesses much potential in contemporary times. As contemporary rhetorical studies emerges as an interdisciplinary endeavor, this methodological definition of rhetoric will allow rhetoricians to explain what rhetorical studies actually studies and how those studies are conducted. It will allow rhetorical critics to bracket the questions that forestall the study of rhetoric and explore a variety of methodological interstices. This definition can further imbue rhetorical studies with a research status tied to method that it has so desperately sought at certain historical junctures.\nAcknowledgements\n\nMany individuals deserve to be recognized for their work in sorting the “method” from the “madness” over the past few years, especially over the course of this project. Indeed, the faculty and graduate students in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Virginia Tech often played the part of Polonius.\n\nMy dissertation advisor, Bernice Hausman, deserves special recognition for her invaluable guidance and careful tutelage, both of which proved particularly noteworthy. Her ability to engage with this project in its every stage is, in large part, the reason behind its timely completion. Many thanks go to her and the members of my dissertation committee—Paul Heilker, Kelly Pender, and Katrina Powell—all of whom offered generous advice on what often were some overly rough drafts.\n\nMy parents, Jim and Barb Gogan, and my sister, Julie, need to be mentioned for their constant encouragement of my studies and this project. Their patience, concern, and optimism are unmatched. Thank you.\n\nAmanda Coleman, for whom this dissertation is dedicated, supported me and this project in countless ways. My heartfelt gratitude goes to her for being my best friend (and my best critic). She was always there to listen, advise, reassure, and calm—at the most crucial, the most hectic, and the most inconvenient times. It was madness, my love, but thankfully there was a method in it.\n# Table of Contents\n\nChapter 1: \nIntroduction and the Case for Rhetorical Method ................................................................. 1\n\nChapter 2: \nRhetorical Method and Rhetorical Questions ....................................................................... 32\n\nChapter 3: \nExtending Exchange: \nA Baudrillardian Approach to Rhetorical Criticism ......................................................... 64\n\nChapter 4: \nRhetorical Studies, the Series, the Model, and Baudrillard ............................................. 106\n\nChapter 5: \nMemorializing Method: \nReconsidering the Reputations of Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida ................. 140\n\nConclusion: \nMethod and Rhetoric: \nDisciplines and Definitions ................................................................................................. 179\n\nWorks Cited .......................................................................................................................... 186\nChapter 1:\n\nIntroduction and the Case for Rhetorical Method\n\nOn September 26, 2009, the Milwaukee Art Museum debuted *Andy Warhol: The Last Decade*. The show was billed as the first exhibition in the United States to survey the work that Warhol “produced during the final years of his life,” years that arguably constituted “the most productive period of his career” (“Andy Warhol”). It included enormous works, some of which were fifteen-feet tall and others of which were thirty-five long. Following its stint in Milwaukee, the show traveled east to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was received well.¹ Mary Louise Schumacher, art and architecture critic for the *Milwaukee Journal Sentinel*, deemed the show to be “a sophisticated one.” *New York Times* reviewer Roberta Smith complimented the show for its attempt “to come to terms with the full range of Warhol’s best late work.” According to *New Yorker* critic Peter Schjeldahl, the pieces included in the exhibition “stand up to the strongest art made by anyone else, anywhere, at the time.”\n\nI attended *Andy Warhol: The Last Decade* before its closing in Milwaukee, and I too enjoyed the range and integrity of the pieces that it included. Its sophistication also impressed me. I was particularly struck with the way this show—a survey of the most productive period for the most product-driven twentieth-century artist—emphasized Warhol’s process in order to offer a new assessment of the artist and his art. This emphasis was not lost on critics who, like Smith, noticed the way in which the show “retraces the evolution of the paintings on view and the increasingly close collaborative\n\n¹ Roberta Smith was largely critical of the staging of the exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. She had more concerns with exhibition’s layout at the Brooklyn Museum than with the actual pieces included in the exhibition.\nmethods of Warhol and his studio assistants.” Among the pieces which captured my attention and the attention of many art critics was a set of twelve small rectangular canvases, each displaying distorted radial shapes in patina greens and turquoise blues that dissolved into lustrous golds and bright coppers. The twelve canvases were assembled into a roughly four-foot by four-foot square with impressive effect. Critics call the piece “ravishing,” “striking,” and “visually arresting” (Smith; McCabe; Schumacher). One critic went so far as to note its “Apollonian beauty” (McCabe). I, too, was captivated by the piece. Critics frequently compare the puddling effect of this piece to the drip effect in Jackson Pollack’s work (Smith). Yet, the critical understanding of this piece changes when the method which Warhol used to compose it is considered. These twelve canvases, Warhol’s *Oxidation Painting (in 12 parts)*, are also referred to as one of Warhol’s “Piss Paintings,” having been composed with a “brush-free method” that consisted of individuals “urinating on canvas treated with metallic copper paint” (Smith). A consideration of Warhol’s “brush-free method” opens this piece up to a myriad of interpretations, with critics speculating that Warhol was responding to Pollack, parodying Pollack, or experimenting with his methods, so as to challenge his associations with a mechanistic silk-screening method (McCabe; Schumacher; McCabe).\n\nThe exhibition is, in the end, notable, not as much for the way in which it presented an artist’s methods (arguably, this emphasis is commonplace in art exhibitions) as it is for the way in which it targeted method so as to question critical interpretation. The show seemed to recognize that interpretations of Warhol, whether favorable or unfavorable, often rely upon an understanding of his method as resembling an assembly line: Warhol, the Pop Artist, cranked out silkscreened paintings like a machine. By\nfocusing on Warhol’s later methods, brush-free or otherwise, the show suggested a way in which Warhol might be understood differently. In other words, the exhibition called for a renewed critical attention to the methods the artist used to guide his composition, and it is the same call that I will be issuing throughout this project.\n\nIn this project, I argue for renewed critical attention to what I refer to as rhetorical method, or the procedures a rhetor uses to guide composition. Rhetorical method is a concept that emphasizes the importance of composition processes (broadly defined to include writing, speaking, and painting, among many others), as well as composition products. This concept, as I will elaborate it, ought to be an important one in rhetorical studies—a broadly conceived rhetorical studies that encompasses all individuals for whom rhetoric is an area of scholarly interest, including those individuals who would identify more closely with rhetoric and writing and those individuals who would identify more closely with rhetoric and speech—for it invites a reassessment of how rhetorical criticism works.\n\nCriticism, Method, Object, and Rhetorical Method\n\nFrom its beginnings, rhetorical criticism has, as Sonja Foss observes, concerned itself with method (“Constituted” 36). Method can be understood as a process, as Jim Kuypers illustrates when he defines method as “a particular manner or process for accomplishing a task” (14). Some rhetorical critics, including Kuypers, conceive of method broadly and consider criticism to be a method. Kuypers lists criticism as an example of a humanistic method, which he contrasts with more rigid and highly replicable scientific methods (14). Similarly, Lester Thonsen and A. Craig Baird offer a\ngeneral definition of rhetorical criticism as “a process or method.” (Speech 16). However, other rhetorical critics, such as Marie Hochmuth Nichols, Barnet Baskerville, and Dilip Gaonkar, conceive of method in more specific terms and align method with a particular perspective. For these scholars, criticism encompasses many different methods, and these critical methods have, as Baskerville notes, proliferated (“Rhetorical” 116). Different counts put the number of critical methods in rhetorical criticism well above fifty.² Listed among these critical methods are the Neo-Aristotelian method, the Burkeian method, and the Marxist method.\n\nDespite the many different types, critical methods all seem to carry out the same function in rhetorical criticism: Critical methods are processes applied to a rhetorical object. A critic uses method to get at a text, to interrogate a phenomenon, to evaluate a movement. Method can, in other words, be understood as the counterpart to the rhetorical object. As Dilip Gaonkar explains in his influential “Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee,” the dialectical relationship between critical method and rhetorical object has fluctuated within twentieth-century rhetorical criticism. Gaonkar traces many articulations of the method-object relationship, presenting a history of twentieth-century rhetorical criticism as associated with rhetoric and speech. According to Gaonkar, Herbert Wichelns’s “The Literary Criticism of Oratory” describes a relationship between method and object, in which the rhetorical object is privileged, the nature of rhetoric is prefigured, and the critic is, therefore, committed to a particular approach or method.³ In sum, Wichelns favors the object at the expense of method. Gaonkar contends that Wichelns’s elevation of the object over method led to two types of\n\n---\n\n² See Jasinski’s reference to the Malton Index (“The Status” 253).\n³ Gaonkar admits that this reading is unorthodox, although he makes a strong case for it.\nresponses. Whereas the first type of response followed Wichelns in privileging the object over method, the second type of response defended the autonomy of method over that of the object. \n\nChief among the second type of responses—those that favored method over object—was Edwin Black’s *Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method*. In Gaonkar’s history, Black’s text is described as the text that “free[d] the critic from the domination of the object,” as well as the text that most fully articulates the response: “the object can no longer master the method” (“Object” 303). By embracing method, Black’s text ushered in a plurality of critical methods. As Gaonkar notes, a plurality of critical methods was deemed to be the only way rhetorical critics, in aggregate, could accomplish “the task of mastering and making intelligible the bewildering variety of objects that constitute rhetoric” (303). Beyond merely reversing the dialectic, Black’s text “snapped” the connection between method and object (303). Black’s text moved to make method autonomous and, in Gaonkar’s opinion, it succeeded (303). Black’s text was so influential that James Jasinski, in “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism,” discusses it as establishing “method-based analytic criticism” as “the norm” for rhetorical criticism (“The Status” 251). By the accounts of both Gaonkar and Jasinski, Black’s text issued an understanding of critical method that aligns with the longstanding notion that a method is “a procedure for attaining an object,” where “attaining” refers to possessing, grasping, or analyzing an object (“Method”). For Black, the ideal rhetorical critic accounts for how a rhetorical object works, and the critic, through method, “means\n\n---\n\n4 Indeed, Gaonkar suggests that critical method predetermines the rhetorical object—that, once a critic selects a method, the critic selects the way in which the rhetorical object is understood. Scholarship in rhetorical studies has, of course, flipped this centuries-old relationship between method and object, and argued that the object masters the method. See McGee as well as Barnett et al.\nto affect the way in which his [sic] auditor will apprehend the object of his [sic] criticism” (*Rhetorical Criticism* 18; 6).\n\nAlthough Black primarily discusses the word *method* as process for accessing, analyzing, or disclosing a rhetorical object, he also appears to deploy the word *method* in a second sense. Rather than asserting method’s autonomy from the rhetorical object, this second sense of the word *method* suggests that there is a kind of method that might contribute to, or be coextensive with, the object. As Jasinski acknowledges, Black’s foreword to the 1978 edition of *Rhetorical Criticism* suggests that critical methods lack objectivity, for they admit the personality of the critic into the act of criticism (“The Status” 266). In that same foreword, Black outlines a continuum of methods: objective methods, such as those a geometrician would use to calculate circumference from diameter; pseudo-objective methods, such as those a surgeon would mobilize to perform an appendectomy; and, wholly contingent methods, such as those used by a musician to compose a sonata (*Rhetorical Criticism* x). After outlining the three methods, Black compares a rhetorical critic’s use of method to the musician’s use of method, contending that “criticism, on the whole, is near the indeterminate, contingent, personal, end of the methodological scale” (xi). It is through this comparison, however, that Black reveals the way in which the musician uses method in a different sense than the geometrician, the surgeon, or even the critic.\n\nAll four methods, critical method included, clearly constitute processes or procedures. A difference emerges, however, when the ability of each of these procedures to be applied to an object is considered. As Black details, the geometrician applies a method to a problem, the surgeon applies a method to a body, and the critic applies a\nmethod to rhetoric. Yet, the musician does not apply method to an object. Rather, the musician employs method like a muse to create a composition. In describing the wholly contingent methods of the musician, Black writes that “there are methods that require personal choices at every step, methods that are pervaded by contingencies” (*Rhetorical Criticism* x). The composition of a sonata serves as his example, and he references “the procedures that figured into the composition” of that sonata (xi). Here, Black invokes a more arcane sense of the word *method*, in which method may be considered “a mode of procedure in any activity” or “a set of […] procedures proper to a particular, practical art” (“Method”). Black’s example of the musician implies that there are methods that contribute to the constitution of the object. Nonetheless, Black remains careful not to subsume method under the object. He has not, in other words, acceded to the position of those who privilege object over method. Instead, by suggesting that method serves a heuristic role in generating the object, he suggests an alternate kind of method, what I refer to as rhetorical method.\n\nRhetorical method, as I define it, refers to the procedures a rhetor uses to guide composition. In its most orderly manifestations, rhetorical method equates to a rigid marshaling of moves that approaches arrangement; it approximates the definition of method most often associated with rhetoric: “The effective marshalling of thoughts and arguments for exposition or literary composition” (“Method”). In its most fluid manifestations, rhetorical method equates to a relaxed heuristic that approaches invention. Regardless of how it manifests itself, though, rhetorical method poses problems for critics, in that the procedures followed by a rhetor cannot be entirely revealed by the critic—after all, they may not even be known to the composer. Black\nacknowledges this critical problem in his discussion of the sonata composer. According to Black, “[o]ne may be able to say subsequent to an act of composition, ‘This is a sonata that has been composed,’ but one may be unable to describe any of the procedures that figured in the composition” (*Rhetorical Criticism* xi). The way in which Black resorts to the third-person “one” and the hypothetical “may” can be read as not only diffidence and equivocation, but as an admission that his example treads upon unfamiliar critical, and methodological, ground. Put more straightforwardly, Black tells readers that a critic can claim with relative certainty that a given product was produced by a process; however, the critic’s description of the process is a far less certain critical enterprise. Black recognizes that rhetorical method confounds the critical enterprise, in that it resists, at least to a degree, the critical ability to analyze the processes which contribute to the rhetorical object. The acknowledgment that a given rhetorical method resists a given critical method’s attempt to describe process, in turn, reveals the flaws inherent to critical method: Criticism cannot capture the capacity of rhetoric to slip, shift, drift, rupture, and resist as it attempts to produce meaning.\\(^5\\)\n\nBlack, for his part, too easily abandons a discussion of rhetorical method and an investigation of how it can contribute to rhetorical criticism. If the scholars in rhetorical studies who follow Black’s lead (by privileging method over object) ignore rhetorical method, then they will foreclose certain interpretations. As Black outlined it, ideal criticism apprehends the rhetorical object and “demands nothing but full disclosure” (*Rhetorical Criticism* 18). However, if critics disregard rhetorical method, they will abandon Black’s ideal and they will also be preempted into conceiving of rhetoric solely\n\n---\n\n\\(^5\\) This is a different limit than the one suggested by Black himself (ie. that criticism invites personality and it cannot be considered objective).\nas a product. As such, critics will ascribe to a position wherein texts function as interpretive touchstones, and this is the position to which Gaonkar assigns critics like Michael Leff. By privileging the text as a product, critics risk overlooking the processes with which a given text has been, is, or will be involved. Rhetorical method asks these product-focused critics to consider the process that leads to the product.\n\nHowever, rhetorical method is also an important consideration for those scholars who favor object over method, those scholars who do not follow Black’s lead. These critics, who have followed Wichelns by focusing on the rhetorical object, have, according to Gaonkar’s history, viewed the rhetorical object as involving multiple processes. Here, Gaonkar offers Michael Calvin McGee as an example of a critic who links the object of criticism to the material and social processes with which rhetoric is inextricable. McGee’s work proposes to collapse texts into contexts, so as to acknowledge that all rhetorical objects are fragments, the whole of which will be impossible for the critic to grasp, possess, or attain (“Object” 287). Indeed, processes factor heavily into McGee’s work and his understanding of rhetoric. As Gaonkar observes, McGee views rhetoric as “a material social process that constitutes (or generates) a wide range of objects” (291). While McGee does acknowledge process, the social and material bent of McGee’s notion of process functions like a critical method. Gaonkar also notes that McGee’s understanding of rhetoric predisposes him to a method, which interprets a diffuse object through material and social approaches.\n\nThe difference between McGee’s understanding of process and the inventive understanding of process captured by the concept of rhetorical method is illustrated by a sampling of McGee’s claims. For instance, McGee asserts that “rhetors make discourses\nfrom scraps and pieces of evidence” (“Text” 279). Here, his admission that “rhetors make discourses” seems to correspond with the notion of rhetorical method. However, his addendum that discourses are made “from scraps and pieces of evidence” focuses critical attention upon the materiality of rhetoric. All processes are, in other words, not equal in McGee’s process-focused approach. Moreover, McGee’s orientation towards social process leads to assertions, such as “Writing makes no sense unless there are readers” (281). Here, McGee aligns “sense” with interpretive processes and forecloses the possibility of an inventive process guided by sense, logic, or procedure. The concept of rhetorical method challenges the limited notions of process under which McGee’s criticism functions and, instead, opens critics up to interpretations based upon the wide range of processes that a rhetor uses to guide composition.\n\nWhen rhetorical critics—regardless of whether their criticism prefers method or object—consider rhetorical method, they embrace the potentialities of interpretation. The concept of rhetorical method counters critical method, and attests to the importance of process for the rhetor, as well as for the critic. Indeed, paying attention to the procedures a rhetor uses to guide a composition provides new perspective on individuals whose methods have been overlooked or flatly categorized as unwavering, unimpressive, or unintelligible; that is, rhetors such as Jean Baudrillard.\n\nRhetorical Method, Reputation, and Interpretation\n\nThe case of Jean Baudrillard illustrates the importance of rhetorical method to rhetorical criticism. In the following pages, I review three treatments of Baudrillard, arguing that the pieces of criticism that engage more fully with Baudrillard’s rhetorical\nmethod offer stronger arguments, that the pieces that interrogate the processes behind a composition forward more comprehensive and more convincing claims. At stake in my discussion of these three pieces of criticism is the degree to which critics of Baudrillard forward well-supported interpretations of Baudrillard’s rhetoric. As my review will show, critical engagement with rhetorical method is all the more important given the critical propensity to base interpretive claims upon a prepackaged understanding of a rhetor’s reputation.\n\nRhetorical method can provide a new perspective on rhetors whose compositional methods have been overshadowed by their reputation. Critical interpretations of Baudrillard often base claims upon a prepackaged understanding of Baudrillard as a cross-disciplinary postmodern rhetor. This reputation overshadows the interpretations of his rhetoric and conditions the critical interpretations of him: his reputation precedes him and forecloses interpretation. In other words, Baudrillard’s reputation functions as a major premise under which criticism follows deductively.\n\nFundamentally, Baudrillard possesses a reputation as a rhetor with an extensive rhetorical prowess. Before his death on March 6, 2007, he had written over forty-five books, given countless interviews, released at least two photography exhibits, and assembled a cult following rivaling that of any one of his contemporaries. Ryan Bishop claims that Jean Baudrillard was “[e]ver the protean rhetorician,” and this claim seems merited, regardless of whether rhetoric is defined as a product or whether rhetoric is defined as a process (5). When rhetoric is considered to be a textual product qua Leff, Baudrillard is seen as the individual who produces the books, speeches, and photographs that are received by audiences. Indeed, this understanding of rhetoric is captured in\nRichard J. Lane’s observation that Baudrillard was “a writer and speaker whose texts [were] performances, attracting huge readerships or audiences” (1). When rhetoric is considered to be a process that involves many interconnecting dynamics qua McGee, Baudrillard is seen as a fragmentary part of these intersections. This understanding of rhetoric appears in William Bogard’s description of Baudrillard as an individual who “cannot stand outside his own milieu,” but “instead, he traces the ways objects and events pass through that milieu” (315).\n\nIn addition to his reputation as a rhetor, Baudrillard also maintains a reputation as an individual whose work epitomizes postmodernism. The name Baudrillard and the label postmodernist are, according to Gary Genosko, synonymous (McLuhan 88). When Baudrillard is not viewed as a synonym to postmodernism, he is considered sovereign to it. In 1989, Marxism Today ordained Baudrillard “the high priest of postmodernism” (qtd. in Merrin 54). As Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner explain, “Baudrillard eventually identified with the postmodern turn and was crowned as high priest of the new epoch” (111). The understanding of Baudrillard as a postmodernist runs rampant throughout much of the literature that introduces scholars to his thought. For instance, anthologies frequently pair selections from Baudrillard with selections from Jean-Francois Lyotard or Frederic Jameson, two other thinkers who are also commonly labeled postmodernists. These pairings further appear in many scholarly articles. It is not uncommon, for instance, to read an article, chapter, or book that treats Baudrillard and then proceeds to Lyotard or Jameson.\n\nBaudrillard’s reputation as a synonym for postmodernism or as sovereign to it conditions the way in which his rhetoric is interpreted. Critics often invoke the\ncommonplace definition of postmodernism as a condition or a period that elevates \\textit{style} over \\textit{substance}, \\textit{form over content} when they address Baudrillardian rhetoric. By prescribing the relationships among the four terms of \\textit{form}, \\textit{content}, \\textit{style}, and \\textit{substance}, the commonplace definition of postmodernism compels criticism of Baudrillard to work within and around the \\textit{style-over-substance} and the \\textit{form-over-content} binaries. This preconceived understanding of the nature of his rhetoric forecloses interpretative possibilities. Criticism of Baudrillard often deprecates the terms that are deprecated in the postmodern binaries, \\textit{substance} and \\textit{content}. Quite frequently, \\textit{substance} and \\textit{content} fall out of scholarly discussion regarding rhetoric unless they are invoked with reference to their relationships with the other two terms, \\textit{style} and \\textit{form}. Sometimes, the two separate binaries—\\textit{style-substance} and \\textit{form-content}—are collapsed into one monolithic binary, in which \\textit{substance} and \\textit{content} are merged as synonyms, and subsumed under \\textit{style/form}. This monolithic binary forecloses interpretation even more, as any difference between \\textit{style} and \\textit{form} or \\textit{substance} and \\textit{content} are effaced.\n\nFinally, Baudrillard is widely regarded as maintaining a cross-disciplinary appeal. Baudrillard himself asserts that his “work has a transversality, a cross-disciplinarity” (Hunter 287). He explains that his work required him to move across disciplines and that “it forced a cross-disciplinarity on [him]” (\\textit{Passwords} 4). Baudrillard further categorizes his work as “reducible to no particular discipline” (\\textit{Passwords} 4). Kellner and Coulter are two Baudrillardian scholars who corroborate Baudrillard’s assessment of his own work. For example, Kellner refers to Baudrillard as a “transdisciplinary theorist” whose work influences “a diverse numbers of disciplines” (\\textit{Jean} 53). Kellner also claims that “Baudrillard’s work cuts across the disciplines and promotes cross-disciplinary thought”\nand that Baudrillard “challenges standard wisdom and puts into question received dogma and methods” (“Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)” 25). As Gerry Coulter comments, “Baudrillard’s work is theory, theory that challenges theory and while doing so passes through many disciplines” (“Reversibility”). Indeed, individuals who draw upon Baudrillard hail from departments of sociology, history, art, architecture, French, English, communication studies, gender studies, film studies, new media studies, cultural studies, writing studies, and rhetorical studies, among others.\n\nWhen cross-disciplinary interpretations of Baudrillard are compared, interpretations of Baudrillard appear to be remarkably consistent in their invocation of the four terms of *form*, *content*, *style*, and *substance*. This consistency indicates that cross-disciplinary critics are largely favoring the Baudrillardian rhetorical object (presupposed to be a postmodern rhetorical object on account of Baudrillard’s reputation) over their own disciplinary methods. Here, the idea is that different disciplines employ different methods and ostensibly these different methods would lead to different findings that are articulated differently. However, these methodological distinctions in approach, findings, and language are largely absent in the criticism of Baudrillard, indicating a general lack of attentiveness to method among interpretations of Baudrillard.\n\n---\n\n6 Most fundamentally, an academic discipline can be defined in terms of what it studies or how it studies it. In other words, the defining characteristics of a discipline could be described as either object or method. In the criticism of Baudrillard, the rhetorical object proves uniform. For instance, take Baudrillard’s *Simulacra and Simulations*. *Simulacra and Simulations* constitutes a rhetorical object that has been studied in many disciplines. Regardless of the discipline, the text *Simulacra and Simulations* does not change. The Baudrillardian object thus seems to travel across disciplines, in the same way that one film might be studied by individuals in history and in gender studies. Since the object of their criticism remains the same, the different disciplines that interpret Baudrillard would seem to only distinguish themselves on account of their different disciplinary methods. For instance, a history scholar might interpret *Simulacra and Simulations* in terms of its portrayal of the Vietnam War, while a gender studies scholar might interpret *Simulacra and Simulations* in terms of its construction of gender.\nSignificantly, Baudrillard’s reputation as a cross-disciplinary, postmodern rhetor is as an interpretation in and of itself. But, as I will show, it often functions as the premise upon which various claims about Baudrillardian rhetoric are articulated. The argumentative chain seems to take Baudrillard’s reputation as a given and the interpretation follows. Here, a consideration of rhetorical method would shift the focus of interpretation from the critic’s reception of a rhetor’s prepackaged reputation to the critic’s construction of a rhetor’s reputation through an investigation of that rhetor’s rhetorical method. In other words, the critic avoids asking the question: How is this rhetor’s reputation received? Instead, the critic asks the question: How does an investigation of the processes that a rhetor uses to guide a composition help construct that rhetor’s reputation?\n\nBryan S. Turner’s “Cruising America”\n\nIn his 1993 “Cruising America,” sociologist Bryan S. Turner offers an interpretation of the rhetoric manifested in Baudrillard’s *America* and, to a lesser degree, *Cool Memories*. This essay is important for the way in which other Baudrillard scholars have referenced it. In particular, Richard J. Lane draws upon Turner’s essay as a basis for his claims about Baudrillard’s writing strategies. Lane suggests that “many of the reactions to Baudrillard have been to do with his style of writing” and Lane impugns Baudrillard as “partly to blame for this travesty, because he has situated himself as an intellectual precisely at the level of style or fashion as a way of writing at the limits of the hyperreal” (127). Lane reads Turner’s essay as an analysis of Baudrillard’s style and regards Turner’s interpretation “as a guide to virtually all of [Baudrillard’s later] texts”\n(Lane 129). In other words, Lane considers Turner’s interpretation to be a rhetorical map for Baudrillardian critics.\n\nThe map that Turner provides critics, if Lane’s claim is to be accepted, comprises a nearly circular argument that only gestures towards rhetorical method briefly. Turner contends that two of Baudrillard’s texts, America and Cool Memories, capture “the postmodern mood” by encouraging readers to “cruise” through texts and practice a superficial form of interpretation (106). However, the superficial postmodern interpretive strategies that his argument explicitly endorses are not the same ones that he uses in his criticism. Turner’s interpretation digs below the surface of a text to the point where it acknowledges rhetorical method. Although Turner stops short of engaging with the procedures that Baudrillard used to guide his composition of America and Cool Memories, Turner’s brief gesture towards rhetorical method reveals an argumentative inconsistency between his argument and his own interpretative strategies.\n\nTurner claims that Baudrillard’s America should be received “within a particular tradition of European critical analysis of America” and that Baudrillard’s text should be “admired and praised” for the way that it captures the postmodern experience (152; 159; 154). Turner positions Baudrillard’s text in what he refers to as a “transatlantic critical tradition,” in which Europeans assess the state of America (151). Yet, he carefully notes that Baudrillard’s America—which “has been either dismissed or received with a deal of criticism”—is, along with Cool Memories, also a part of the short form tradition that Turner connects to La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes et Memoires (151). Linking Baudrillard’s texts to these two traditions, Turner suggests that the texts, which are situated at the crossroads of the transatlantic critique and the maxim, constitute rhetoric\nthat might be volatile to critics, namely academic scholars. Indeed, he notes that the texts are “offensive to academics, especially serious academics” (152). Regardless of their poor reception, Turner interprets these two texts as quite amenable to scholarly study.\n\nIn his interpretation, Turner argues that Baudrillard’s texts participate in a “postmodern cruising through America,” and this argument is assured its support by a critical move that places Baudrillard, rhetoric, and the Baudrillardian rhetorical object within a postmodern paradigm. The contention becomes nearly circular with Turner arguing that texts (composed by rhetor whose name is synonymous with postmodernism) are postmodern. Moreover, he follows the binary relationship associated with a presupposed understanding of the postmodern, articulating his findings with the terms style, form, and content. To justify his interpretation of the two texts as exhibiting a postmodern cruising, Turner suggests thinking about Baudrillard’s America and Cool Memories “from the point of view of their style” (152). When he examines the works in terms of their style, he discovers four “ingredients” in Baudrillard’s writing (155). According to Turner, style constitutes the most prominent of all the ingredients in Baudrillard’s writing. He surmises that, in Baudrillard’s writing, “style, or form, is everything; content and matter are diversions” (155). This claim operates under the monolithic postmodern binary, in which style and form are synonymous and elevated above content/substance. Some pages later, Turner invokes this binary definition again as he discusses the maxim. He observes that “form subordinates content” (156). Indeed, style and form are really everything in Turner’s interpretation, for the other three ingredients in Baudrillard’s writing—repetition, hyperbole, and nonlinear sequence—could all be rhetorically categorized as components of style or form.\nBut even in this piece of criticism, which uses a conflated style/form to argue that Baudrillardian rhetoric “expresses the postmodern mood,” Turner invokes the concept of rhetorical method, or the processes a rhetor uses to guide composition (106). As Turner develops his analysis of Baudrillard’s texts, his interpretation begins to confront Baudrillard’s rhetorical method by suggesting that *America* follows the method of the Situationists, a group that influenced Baudrillard. Turner further explains that *America* “appears to avoid any simplistic critique of American values” and, indeed, that “conventional methods of enquiry are fatuous” given Baudrillard’s assessment of society and his comments about critique in his previous work (152). Thus, Turner traces a lineage of Baudrillard’s earlier work and influences, in order to vaguely suggest that the unconventional methods of the Situationists guided Baudrillard’s composition of *America* (152). Admittedly, the importance of rhetorical method seems slight in this passage. However, its importance to Turner’s interpretation increases further along into his essay. For instance, when he contrasts the two texts, Turner refers to *Cool Memories* as “a clever, but disconnected, set of notes” and he compares it to *America*, which “appears to have more organization and is self-consciously designed as a text with an audience in mind” (152). Here, Turner’s reference to Baudrillard’s design of *America* again gestures towards the processes that “self-consciously” guided Baudrillard during the composition of *America*. Later in the article, Turner admires the “carefully constructed form” of the maxim (156). Rhetorical method appears most strongly in this piece when Turner discusses the four ingredients in Baudrillard’s writing. First, Turner notes that, “[w]hen art historians want to indicate a certain self-conscious artistry, they talk about the ‘painterly’ qualities of a creative artist” (155). Then, Turner asserts that “Baudrillard is\nextraordinarily “writerly” (155). Thus, Turner acknowledges the “self-conscious artistry” in Baudrillard’s America and Cool Memories. He implies that “reflexivity and writerly qualities” exude from the texts. This claim most convincingly extends back beyond the rhetorical products and into Baudrillard’s processes of composition (155). Here, the way in which Turner’s criticism flirts with the concept of rhetorical method is unmistakable.\n\nUnfortunately, Turner refrains from engaging with rhetorical method more fully. Turner’s interpretation reaches an impasse; he seems reluctant to engage with the concept of rhetorical method behind the texts and he stops short of allowing his references to Baudrillard’s self-conscious method, careful construction, and mindful design of texts to actually impact his interpretation of Baudrillardian rhetoric. However, the underlying presence of rhetorical method in Turner’s criticism reveals a larger inconsistency in Turner’s argument. Turner’s treatment of America and Cool Memories analyzes the characteristics of cruising that each text exhibits. Cruising, as Turner defines it, is “a trivial exercise”; it “does not intend to interpret;” it “is pointless, aimless, and unproductive” (152; 153; 153). Turner argues that readers “can cruise through” these two texts, “sampling the style” (155). But, as much as Turner encourages critics to cruise through and sample the style of Baudrillard’s texts, Turner cannot avoid providing an interpretation of these texts. In other words, Turner’s criticism does much more than sample style. His interpretation reveals cruising to be impossible for the critic as he himself provides an initial foray into an interpretation of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method.\n\nCatherine Constable’s “Postmodernism and Film”\nIn her 2004 contribution to *The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism*, film studies scholar Catherine Constable argues that the accounts of postmodernism forwarded by Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson impact film studies and affect film theory and history. Constable’s article dedicates its first section to an interpretation of Baudrillard, its second section to an interpretation of Jameson, its third section to a discussion the tensions between modernism and postmodernism in film studies, and its fourth section to an analysis of the 1997 film *Face/Off*. While the central claim in this article—that accounts of postmodernism impacts film studies—is so general that it is unimpressive, each individual section contains much more specific claims supported by insightful interpretation. In its first section, Constable’s article invokes Baudrillard’s reputation as a postmodern rhetor in order to dismantle the presupposition about postmodern rhetoric. To explode the binary of *style*-over-*substance*, Constable briefly addresses Baudrillard’s rhetorical method, demonstrating the way in which rhetorical method enables stronger argumentative claims than those claims based on presuppositions. Constable, however, abandons the line of argumentation associated with rhetorical method only to collapse back into preconceived notions of Baudrillard and his rhetoric.\n\nConstable’s treatment of Baudrillard traces the apocalyptic figurations of reality-as-film that occur throughout Baudrillard’s oeuvre. She argues that these postmodern metaphors of circulation incite critical debate. Thus, she offers a meta-critical commentary on Baudrillard, as he is received through apocalyptic postmodern metaphors. Constable notes, for instance, that “Baudrillard’s nihilistic presentation of the postmodern continues to provoke considerable critical debate within academia” (46). In her estimation, “it is hard to judge the status of [Baudrillard’s] assertions” on account of the\n“relish with which Baudrillard presents his apocalypse” (46). Noting the critical tendency to treat Baudrillardian rhetoric as science fiction, she attributes the indeterminate status of Baudrillardian rhetoric to Baudrillard’s style. According to Constable, “[t]he refusal to treat Baudrillard’s work as theoretical is a common critical response and serves to draw attention to particular problems created by his style” (47). Thus, Constable’s review of criticism of Baudrillard focuses on the presupposed nature of postmodern rhetoric as elevating style over substance and, ultimately, how the postmodern paradigm overshadows Baudrillardian rhetoric.\n\nConstable’s gloss of the criticism of Baudrillard suggests her dissatisfaction with various interpretations of Baudrillardian rhetoric that have been foreclosed by his reputation as a postmodernist. She is quick to acknowledge the problem of Baudrillard’s reputation and the insufficient interpretations produced by it. According to Constable, “reading Baudrillard’s texts as symptomatic of a postmodern valorization of style over substance (however tempting) is ultimately inappropriate because the style is the substance” (47, original emphasis). Here, it becomes apparent that Constable only invokes to the postmodern binary of style-over-substance in order to dissolve the binary. Her argument champions aesthetic monism, in which no distinction can be made between style and substance. While this argument is familiar to rhetoricians who study style, it is a bold assertion in the context of past treatments of Baudrillardian rhetoric. Constable’s argument works deductively—from the premises that Baudrillard is a postmodern rhetor and postmodern rhetoric elevates style over substance—only to refute that deduction. Constable argues that critics should abandon the major premises from which they work.\ndeductively and, instead, consider style and substance to be one entity in Baudrillardian rhetoric.\n\nTo support this argument, Constable invokes Baudrillard’s rhetorical method as a means by which critics can reassess Baudrillard and consider him a rhetor belonging to a tradition that extends back to Nietzsche. Constable contends that “Baudrillard presents himself as one of Nietzsche’s successors” (47). More precisely, she suggests that Baudrillard and Nietzsche share a rhetorical method. As Constable notes, the connection between the two rhetors resides in their “mode of writing philosophy” (47). Here, the phrase “mode of writing” gestures towards the concept of rhetorical method, or the procedures a rhetor uses to guide composition. Constable describes the mode of writing shared by these two rhetors as the adoption of an overt rhetoric that draws attention to the status of their writings (47). There is, in other words, a rhetorical confluence in the way in which each rhetor composes his text. Constable states that Baudrillard and Nietzsche can both “be seen to adopt” their similar modes of writing, and it is in this statement—Constable’s interpretation of the rhetors’ processes—that the critic acknowledges rhetorical method. Constable argues that Baudrillard’s writing functions “to provoke a response, forcing the reader to rise to the challenge that he presents” (47). Accordingly, Constable’s interpretation positions Baudrillard as a rhetor whose writing is more purposeful and deliberate in its aim than the stylistic play commonly associated with postmodernists.\n\nConstable’s argument briefly invokes rhetorical method to combat Baudrillard’s reputation as a postmodern rhetor and the presuppositions which follow from that reputation. Unfortunately, Constable’s engagement with rhetorical method is too\ntransitory to sustain her claims. After arguing against claims that Baudrillardian rhetoric elevates style over substance in a postmodern fashion, Constable retreats into commentary about Baudrillard’s style and his position as a postmodernist. She claims that Baudrillard merely adds “to the theoretical debates concerning the postmodern” and constructs himself “as the self-styled bad boy of the postmodern theorists” (47). Evading the possibility that Baudrillard might be known as something other than a postmodernist and that postmodern rhetoric might consist of something other than style, Constable appears to fall back into the very interpretations that she argued against. In the end, she seems too complacent with describing Baudrillard as the “self-styled bad boy of postmodern theorists” (47).\n\nWilliam Merrin’s Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction\n\nIn his 2005 Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction, media and communication studies scholar William Merrin stresses the importance of method in any act of criticism and positions method as a critical tool accomplishing four goals: (1) forwarding the Baudrillardian critical project; (2) emphasizing Baudrillard’s sociological lineage; (3) promoting an understanding of Baudrillard within his home discipline; and, (4) applying Baudrillard’s work to contemporary media phenomena.\n\nWithin the first few pages of his book, Merrin abandons Baudrillard’s prepackaged reputation as a postmodernist. In no uncertain terms, Merrin declares his critical “rejection of Baudrillard’s positioning as a postmodernist,” a repudiation that he explains through a description of his approach to criticism of Baudrillard (7). In other words, he attributes his willingness to reject the postmodern description of Baudrillard to\nhis own critical approach. Merrin describes his critical approach as an approach that “unfolds,” allowing for deficiencies in Baudrillard’s work while maintaining an openness to its critical value (6). Merrin stakes his critical ground early and associates himself with a group of Baudrillardian critics that includes Mike Gane, William Pawlett, and Paul Hegarty. As Merrin explains, he strives to encounter Baudrillardian rhetoric on a critical ground that is more hospitable than the “merely negative” adversarial approaches practiced by Douglas Kellner and Christopher Norris (6). By rejecting Baudrillard’s postmodern reputation and encountering Baudrillard more hospitably, Merrin fulfills two of the purposes that he outlines for his treatment. First, he forwards the Baudrillardian critical project by offering different interpretations of Baudrillard and Baudrillardian rhetoric. Second, he repositions Baudrillard by emphasizing the criticism that traces his sociological lineage and ignoring the criticism that focuses upon his connections with postmodernism.\n\nThis treatment of Baudrillard explicitly considers method by further foregrounding “the question of methodology,” which, according to Merrin, “animates all of [Baudrillard’s] work” (9). Merrin contrasts Baudrillard’s method with empirical methods. In Baudrillard’s “anti-empiricist methodology,” Merrin locates an important similarity between Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan (61). He even claims that the “question of method […] is central to understanding Baudrillard’s work, its critical status and its aims” (43). In Merrin’s work, there is a strong move to apply Baudrillard’s method to other disciplinary objects. Merrin wants his treatment of Baudrillard “to demonstrate the value of this [Baudrillardian] media theory for media and communication studies” (150). He claims that Baudrillard’s most important contributions\nto media studies are methodological; that Baudrillard’s methodology contributes to “a\ncritical model whose relevance and ease of application to a variety of contemporary\nmedia phenomena are easy to recognize” (157). Here, the word *method* is used with\nrespect to a critical method—one that can be applied to analyze a rhetorical object or\nphenomenon. Thus, Merrin’s turn toward method enables him to work towards the\nadditional, self-stated goals of promoting an understanding of Baudrillard within his\nhome discipline and applying Baudrillard’s work to contemporary media phenomena.\n\nWhile some of his references to Baudrillard’s method clearly align with critical\nmethod, other invocations of the word *method* seem to suggest that Merrin is also\nconcerned with rhetorical method, or the processes a composer uses to guide a\ncomposition. For example, Merrin refers to Baudrillard’s theoretical methodology and\nnotes that, for Baudrillard, “[t]heory is a process of invention” (158). Here, Merrin\nsuggests that Baudrillard draws upon theory as a rhetorical method, or a procedure for\ninventing arguments, texts, events, and phenomena. This reference is Merrin’s closest\nattempt at engaging with rhetorical method through the term *method*. Most often, he\ndistinguishes Baudrillard’s method from Baudrillard’s writing, listing writing and\nmethodology as two distinct entities. Subsequently, Merrin implies that writing and\nmethod are not connected; that the method (or methodology) to which he refers is not\nrhetorical method (55, 150). Nonetheless, Merrin’s discussion of the similarities between\nMcLuhan and Baudrillard manages to confront the concept of rhetorical method.\n\nAppearing reluctant to engage with rhetorical method, Merrin’s interpretation relies upon\nthe terms *style*, *form*, and *content*. Merrin claims that the two theorists “share a similar\nwriting style, both employing the form of their writing as part of their philosophy” (60).\nAlthough the relationship between *style* and *form* remain ambiguous in this claim, his elaboration of the claim reveals that he conceives of *style* and *form* as independent critical terms. For Merrin, style refers to ornamentation and form approximates genre. For example, when he explains McLuhan’s style, he offers a list of ornamental figures and strategies including metaphors and puns (60). Likewise, he notes that Baudrillard has been recognized for employing “a specific writing style” (61). Additionally, when Merrin explains Baudrillard’s *form*, he catalogs a list of genres including reviews, essays, poetry, aphorisms, interviews, and lectures (61). According to Merrin, McLuhan also mobilized *form* to reach his reader (61). In this interpretation of McLuhan and Baudrillard, *style* and *form* are allowed to stand alone as independent critical terms, further suggesting that Merrin’s interpretation does not presuppose the nature of rhetoric.\n\nIn his comparison of McLuhan and Baudrillard, rhetorical method—although it proceeds unnamed—emerges as one of the Merrin’s central concerns. Merrin asserts that, for both Baudrillard and McLuhan, “critical content and form are inseparable as part of a coherent and unified, career-long strategy of writing and thinking” (61). In this assertion, Merrin makes two moves. First, he champions the view of aesthetic monism, in which *form* and *content* cannot be separated. In doing so, he resolutely rejects the presupposed understanding of rhetoric as operating in accordance with the binary that pits *form* against *content*. Second, he associates the rhetoric of both Baudrillard and McLuhan with a longstanding method, or what he describes as “a coherent and unified, career-long strategy” (61). In other words, Merrin argues that Baudrillard and McLuhan are similar in that they both maintain a longstanding rhetorical method. According to Merrin, the\nrhetorical methods of each theorist span their respective careers and impact their writing as well as their thought.\n\nUltimately, Merrin’s interpretation forwards a strong argument that meets his goals because it explicitly focuses on Baudrillard’s method. Although it does not name Baudrillard’s rhetorical method as such and, indeed, often considers writing and methodology wholly separate entities, Merrin acknowledges the role rhetorical method plays in interpretation. Merrin’s criticism recognizes the importance of the strategies deployed by a rhetor during composition, even if it does not provide those strategies the most comprehensive treatment.\n\nRhetorical Method and Critical Reconsideration\n\nMy analysis of these three pieces of cross-disciplinary criticism of Baudrillard demonstrates the way in which rhetorical method appears essential to the interpretive strength of each critical argument. Each of these three pieces confront situations in which Baudrillard’s reputation as a cross-disciplinary, postmodern rhetor precedes him and conditions particular interpretations of his rhetoric and they do so in very different ways. Turner’s article seems comfortable issuing an almost circular argument that contradicts his own approach to criticism. Constable’s argument attempts to dissolve the presuppositions about the nature of rhetoric that are attached to Baudrillard’s reputation as a postmodern rhetor, only to revert back to those same arguments. Merrin’s book breaks away from a preconditioned interpretation by concentrating on method. However, in all of these pieces of criticism, rhetorical method emerges as an extremely important concept. In each of these pieces of criticism, rhetorical method provides key\nargumentative evidence upon which major interpretive claims are built and, in each of these treatments, the soundness of the argument seems to be associated with the degree to which each critic engages with rhetorical method. For Turner, glancing references to Baudrillard’s self-conscious writings appear inconsistent with his endorsement of interpretive cruising. For Constable, vague references to Baudrillard’s mode of writing, his adoption of particular writing practices, and his purpose in writing are not strong enough to prevent an argumentative return to preconditioned or foreclosed interpretations. For Merrin, a deliberate focus on method and a particular attention to Baudrillard’s coherent writing strategies facilitate an interpretation that meets his critical goals and avoids interpretive foreclosure.\n\nMy analysis of these three interpretations reveals that addressing rhetorical method is fundamentally important to critical work on Baudrillard and that addressing method has the potential to challenge preconceived notions of a rhetor’s ethos. My reading of these three interpretations suggests the value of rhetorical method as a critical concept. Moreover, my reading intimates that a more substantive and more sustained critical engagement with rhetorical method would substantially shift rhetorical criticism by asking two questions: (1) How does rhetorical method work to construct a rhetor’s reputation? (2) More generally, how have we formulated our critical judgments?\n\nThese two questions constitute questions that are widely applicable to all types of criticism and all types of compositions. As I have demonstrated, considering rhetorical method asks critics to reconsider the foundations for their interpretive claims. To emphasize this point, I return to my opening discussion of the exhibition Andy Warhol: The Last Decade and Warhol’s “Piss Paintings.” I began this chapter by suggesting that\ninterpreting the rhetorical method an artist, in this case Warhol, uses to compose a particular piece of art alters the critical understanding of both the art and the artist. I then carried this suggestion through to the case of Jean Baudrillard for the remainder of the chapter. In both of these cases, my claim has remained the same: When critics interpret the rhetorical methods a rhetor uses during composition, new understandings of the rhetor and the rhetoric are made possible.\n\nAs individuals who are familiar with Baudrillard’s writing will have recognized, my pairing of Warhol and Baudrillard was quite deliberate, for Warhol and his art—what could, by some definitions, easily be called his rhetoric—receives much criticism in the writings of Jean Baudrillard. Indeed, Baudrillard interprets Warholian rhetoric in no less than fifteen of his publications. Baudrillard’s interpretations of Warhol and his rhetoric are at the same time critical and complimentary. Baudrillard acknowledges a sort of shrewdness in Warhol’s work, but he also regards Warhol’s method of composing art with disdain. Above all else, Baudrillard’s criticism of Warhol is derived from his understanding of Warhol’s rhetorical method.\n\nIn the essay “Machinic Snobbery,” Baudrillard contends that “[m]odern art had gone a very long way in the deconstruction of its object, but it is Warhol who has gone furthest in the annihilation of the artist and the creative act” (79). Baudrillard argues that Warhol has become his rhetorical method in the most rigid sense of the concept, in which method becomes so orderly that it is mechanical. This understanding of rhetorical method is clearly an extreme understanding of the concept that sits in contradistinction to an understanding of rhetorical method as fluid and organic. For Baudrillard, the mechanical\nmethod defines Warhol. According to Baudrillard, Warhol has morphed into his machine-like rhetorical method. “Warhol is a machine,” proclaims Baudrillard (78).\n\nIn the end, Baudrillard’s definition of Warhol as a machine relies upon his interpretation of Warhol’s rhetorical method. Baudrillard interprets one of the infamous Pop Artist’s rhetorical method as follows: “Warhol starts out from any old image, eliminates the imaginary dimension and makes it pure visual product” (“Machinic” 78). For Baudrillard, Warhol’s method makes him emblematic of unchecked production and a proliferation of copied products. As Baudrillard sees it, this production and proliferation voids Warhol’s status as an artist and, instead, positions him as a machine. On the one hand, Baudrillard seems enamored with Warhol’s ability to mechanistically produce silkscreens so prolifically. In Baudrillard’s estimation, the sheer scope of this process retains the potential to radically confront disciplinary standards and boundaries. Baudrillard writes that the “point of his work is a challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics” (81). On the other hand, Baudrillard appears disgusted by Warhol’s method. His essay is partly an “interminable polemic” that addresses Warhol’s “complicity with the media or the capitalist system” (83).\n\nBaudrillard, for his part, plays his competing interpretations of Warhol—Warhol as a challenge to convention and Warhol as complicit with convention—against one another. Nonetheless, Baudrillard’s interpretive play is predicated upon his understanding of Warhol the machine-like rhetor, who works in a small factory studio churning out piece after piece, silk screen after silk screen, through a process that resembles an assembly line. In spite of his ambivalent interpretation of Warhol and Warholian rhetoric, the fact that Baudrillard exhibits a keen concern about the processes which guide\ncompositions might, at least for some readers, be a startling revelation in and of itself. By reading Baudrillard’s criticism of Warhol and recognizing the attention that Baudrillard pays to rhetorical method, an individual might arrive at a new perspective regarding Baudrillard, his reputation, and his rhetoric.\n\nThe same interpretive ambivalence that occurs in Baudrillard’s essay seemed to also occur at the Warhol exhibition that I attended in 2009 and described in this chapter’s opening. I was at the time and I continue to be particularly impressed with the way in which this exhibition opened up a space for new understandings of Warhol. It showed that Warhol’s mechanistic method was one method among many. Indeed, investigating rhetorical method opens up new interpretive possibilities and new perspectives. In turn, these possibilities and perspectives require the critic to more carefully construct interpretive arguments. Thus, rhetorical method affords the critic more interpretive options, while simultaneously requiring more rigorous interpretive supports and more sound argumentative foundations. After having attended the exhibit and considering the way in which interpretations of rhetorical method allow critics to forward alternate interpretations of a rhetor and his or her rhetoric, I cannot help but wonder as to whether Jean Baudrillard was ever aware of Warhol’s later works and the methods—including the brush-free method—that forged those works. One can only speculate as to how an understanding of Warhol’s different rhetorical methods might have compelled Baudrillard to offer wildly different kinds of interpretations of Warhol.\nChapter 2:\n\nRhetorical Method and Rhetorical Questions\n\nIn the previous chapter, I called upon critics to deliberately engage with the concept of rhetorical method and demonstrated the way in which rhetorical method manifests itself in cross-disciplinary pieces of criticism. As I defined it, the concept of rhetorical method encompasses the wide variety of compositional procedures and processes that may guide a rhetor. Rhetorical methods may be unidentifiable to the rhetor who tacitly deploys these procedures during composition, may serve as inventive heuristics that a rhetor loosely references during composition, or may operate as a set of moves arranged quite rigidly by a rhetor during composition. While my survey of the cross-disciplinary criticism of Baudrillardian rhetoric implied that Baudrillard drew upon processes which guided his compositions, I stopped short of articulating any of Baudrillard’s rhetorical methods.\n\nThis chapter demonstrates the way in which an understanding of rhetorical method opens up new understandings of rhetors and their rhetoric, by critically engaging Jean Baudrillard’s dominant rhetorical method: exchange. I draw upon the concept of rhetorical method to argue that Baudrillard was a highly methodical rhetor, a rhetor whose method was more rigid than fluid. As I demonstrate, Baudrillard’s dominant rhetorical method—a method derived from his reconfiguration of the rhetorical paradigm and his understanding of language—guides his writing and his photography. To support my argument, I leverage Baudrillard’s metaphorical and processual descriptions of exchange against one of his last writings: the 2007 book Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (Why). According to Toby Lichtig of the Times Literary Supplement,\nWhy’s “effect is one of obscurity in all its senses.” However, my analysis of Why argues the contrary—that Why actually make sense in all of its obscurity. As I show, an analysis of Why that considers rhetorical method reveals that Baudrillard remained remarkably consistent in his method, even when the phenomena to which he responded shifted. When critics consider Why in terms of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method, they come to view the text as a highly methodological attempt to rhetorically initiate exchange in the face of the posthumanist turn in thought. Such an analysis positions Baudrillard as a serious theorist who deliberately challenges the fundamental premises of communication, rather than an obscure stylist who is difficult to read. \n\nRewriting Rhetorical Paradigms\n\nRhetorical methods are often dependent upon a rhetor’s configuration of rhetoric, and Baudrillard’s dominant rhetorical method is built upon a radical rhetorical paradigm that ignores reception. Under the conventional rhetorical paradigm, a rhetor and an audience negotiate the meaning of a message through the production and reception of text. Convention holds that a rhetor produces rhetoric and an audience receives that rhetoric. Meaning is made, negotiated, and perhaps changed during the transit of the text. To be sure, there are dozens of variants to this conventional sender-receiver rhetorical paradigm. Some variants explicitly reject the idea of the rhetor’s agency, while others complicate the notion of audience. A third group of variants interrogate the status of the text. However, even these variations insist that meaning is made through complex activities and intricate negotiations that occur external to the text.\n\n---\n\n7 Reconsidering Baudrillard’s positioning as a theorist might, in turn, compel the reconsideration of other thinkers. As Mike Gane suggests, “Perhaps Baudrillard will force people to reread a number of writers—McLuhan, Nietzsche—who are often thought to be unreadable” (Baudrillard: Critical 3).\nIn this externally focused rhetorical paradigm, criticism and interpretation occur in conjunction with the reception of a text. In the case of a written text, readers constitute the receivers, the interpreters, and the critics. Since the textually mediated writer-reader relationship comprises the fundamental hermeneutical relationship under the conventional rhetorical paradigm, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the scholarship discussing Baudrillard’s writing focuses on Baudrillard’s readers, namely the way in which they receive his writing. In other words, reader reception of Baudrillardian writing assumes a prominent role under the conventional rhetorical paradigm. Readers receive Baudrillard’s writing tepidly, often with a penchant for scathing reviews, and scholars have primarily addressed these inflammatory receptions and unfavorable portrayals by attempting to reform the practice of reading Baudrillard. Arthur Kroker, for instance, describes a method of panic reading and Mike Gane details a reader-response trajectory that moves from naiveté to criticism to balance. Both of these approaches offer successful and satisfactory methods for rectifying highly unsavory, or simply confused, receptions of Baudrillard and his writing by focusing on the act of reading. This focus on reading adheres to the conventional rhetorical paradigm, yet it simultaneously obscures the fact that Baudrillard works under a different rhetorical paradigm. In fact, in Why, Baudrillard suggests that the rhetorical assumption that lumps humans together as “unwitting\n\n---\n\n8 This focus on the relationship between readers and writers is understandable for two reasons. First, this writer-reader relationship is integral to the dominant, materialist theory of language, where the writer-reader relationship approximates the producer-consumer relationship in a content-dependent knowledge economy. Second, the hermeneutical paradigms which accompanied readers’ receptions of some of Baudrillard’s most (in)famous writings often privileged reality, as was the case with new historicism, or the reader, as was the case with reader-response theory. Thus, the dominant critical milieu when Baudrillard was writing seemed to endorse the materialist theory of language, as well as the relationship between writer and reader.\n\n9 In Baudrillard and the Media, Merrin explains Baudrillard’s writing in terms of a “spiralling of semiotic and symbolic forces” (101). Obviously, Merrin’s invocation of the figure of the spiral adds a complexity to rhetoric that is not conventionally attributed to the rhetorical triangle.\ntransmitters and receivers” is “aberrant” and hegemonic (44). Baudrillard, for his part, considers the conventional rhetorical paradigm to be so deeply flawed that he abandons it.\n\nIn a departure from the conventional rhetorical paradigm, Baudrillard considers meaning to be made—and challenged—in accordance with a significantly revised rhetorical paradigm. For Baudrillard, meaning is made and challenged within a text, so that readers are consequently excised from the rhetorical paradigm. As such, reader-focused approaches to explaining Baudrillard’s writing run contrary to Baudrillard’s own approach. Indeed, he repeatedly repudiates interpretation and criticism. According to Baudrillard, interpreters of texts handle signs that are in a sort of “fallen” state (Perfect73). Making it clear that he does not participate in the derivative act of interpretation, he unequivocally declares: “I don’t interpret anything” (Art 34). Also, criticism constitutes an enterprise that is “unhappy by nature” (Perfect 104). Baudrillard’s dismissals of interpretation and criticism are indicative of the way in which he appears to completely ignore his readers, often to the peril of his reputation. His readers might be confused, frustrated or infuriated with his writing, but Baudrillard enjoys writing, stating that “writing has always given me pleasure” (Baudrillard Live 179). His comments from this same 1991 interview evidence his view that writing does not need readers for external validation. In that interview, he disregards his readers and unabashedly declares: “I just write for myself” (Baudrillard Live 182).\n\n---\n\n10 The distinction between analysis and interpretation has been expounded elsewhere. See Kuypers, Jasinski, and Black’s Rhetorical Criticism.\n\n11 To reframe the distinction: Baudrillard finds pleasure in writing. In a 1991 interview, Baudrillard states that “writing has always given me pleasure” (Baudrillard Live 179). The problem, however, is that reading Baudrillard’s writing seldom gives readers pleasure. Rather, Baudrillard’s writing often confuses, frustrates, or infuriates readers—so much so that these negative receptions taint Baudrillard’s reputation.\nAs a writer who writes for himself, Baudrillard has been recognized by Bryan S. Turner as being “extraordinarily writerly” (155). If scholars agree with Turner’s assessment that Baudrillard is a writerly writer who remains unconcerned with readers, then scholars need to engage Baudrillard’s writing not as writing meant to be read, but instead as writing meant to be written: Baudrillard’s writing needs to be engaged as acts of writing compositionally guided by inventive and organizational processes.\\(^\\text{12}\\)\n\n**Agonistic Theories of Language**\n\nRhetorical methods are often built upon a rhetor’s theory of language, and Baudrillard’s dominant rhetorical method relies upon an exchange between language theories. By extracting the receiver from the conventional rhetorical paradigm, Baudrillard locates the act of writing in between two theories of language. Both theories define language in terms of its relationship to meaning and value, not to the receiver. Subsequently, both theories render the receiver as inconsequential to the operation of language. Together, these theories hold that language, words, and signs make and challenge meaning irrespective of a receiver. The first theory attempts to mobilize language in a way that generates meaning and creates value. Baudrillard refers to this first theory as the materialist theory of language: *Language uses words as “things” to produce meaning, meaning is consumed, and valued is established.* The second theory attempts to void any value attributed to language, and Baudrillard calls this theory the\n\n\\(^\\text{12}\\) Baudrillard’s rejection of the conventional, externally oriented view of rhetoric and his preference for a radical, internally oriented view of rhetoric leaves him susceptible to the charge that his rhetoric is more akin to a poetics. The relationship between rhetoric and poetics is beyond the scope of this chapter, but notable discussions of this relationship can be found in Berlin’s *Rhetories, Poetics, and Cultures* and Gaonkar’s “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science.”\nanti-materialist theory of language: *Words are not things, and language and materiality attempt to eradicate one another.* ¹³\n\nThe difference between the materialist theory of language and the anti-materialist theory of language might otherwise be understood in terms of representation. The materialist theory of language forwards a strong conception of representation through a sign system, in which a signifier (some “thing”) represents and refers to a signified (some “matter”). The anti-materialist theory of language not only works against representation and reference, but also works against presentation (existence). More than simply questioning a representational relationship, the anti-materialist theory of language conceives of language as antagonizing the presence of matter. The correspondence, which is characteristic of representation and reference, is replaced with defiance.\n\nWhether it is an act of writing or an act of photography, Baudrillard situates rhetoric at the juncture of the materialist theory of language and the anti-materialist theory of language. Rather than transmitting a message between a sender and a receiver as the conventional rhetorical paradigm would have it, rhetoric, in this sense, enables movement between both theories and facilitates an antagonistic exchange between the making of meaning and the challenging of meaning. Of course, in any act of rhetoric—an act of writing or an act of photography—there are material and immaterial aspects, yet rhetoric distinguishes itself from the theories of language which are being exchanged. For instance, take the rhetorical activity of writing. Baudrillard acknowledges that there is a material aspect to the act of writing: pen ink or pencil lead marking paper. ¹⁴ He also\n\n---\n\n¹³ For a detailed description of these two theories, see *Symbolic Exchange and Death* (233-8). See also *The Ecstasy of Communication*.\n\n¹⁴ Baudrillard calls this the “formal materiality of expression” (*Perfect* 104). By drawing attention to it, Baudrillard draws attention to the physical relationship that a writer enters into. In *Paroxysm*, Baudrillard\nrecognizes that the act of writing always grapples with an “allusive force” of\nindeterminacy, a “juggling with meaning” that occurs during an expression (*Perfect* 104).\nHowever, these interpretations of certain components of the act correspond to the\nparticular theories of language, but do not describe the rhetorical activity. Thus, the act of\nwriting is not predisposed to either theory of language and is distinctive for its activity—\nits rhetorical activity.\n\nBaudrillard envisions any act of writing as establishing a relationship between the\ntwo competing language theories, one materialist and one anti-materialist. By outlining\nthis particular role for writing, he also fundamentally explains his dominant rhetorical\nmethod, and that method is *exchange*. Baudrillard’s writing aims to develop an\nambivalent rhetorical space in which both theories of language can engage in an\nexchange relationship. His purpose—the initiation of exchange—guides his compositions\non a fundamental level. Significantly, though, exchange is not teleological, as it is a\nmovement that has no end or no ultimate goal. Rather, exchange is methodological, as it\nis an unfolding and ongoing process that has no end. Exchange is Baudrillard’s most\ndominant rhetorical method, for Baudrillardian rhetoric strives to initiate and sustain\nexchange, to maintain the agonistic relationship between the materialist theory of\nlanguage and the anti-materialist theory of language.\n\nTo better explain Baudrillard’s rhetorical method of exchange and the way in\nwhich an act of writing engages the materialist and anti-materialist theories of language\n\nelaborates upon these relationships. Baudrillard seems to approve of writing relationships that involve a pen\nand paper, or even a typewriter, yet Baudrillard does not condone the relationship (or lack of one)\nestablished between a writer and a computer (*Paroxysm* 31-2). See also *Cool Memories II*, in which\nBaudrillard states: “Word-processing as the artificial paradise of writing” (12).\nin exchange, I turn to a metaphor that he himself relies upon in his own discussions of exchange. This metaphor compares exchange to a two-sided game.\n\nThe Two-Side Game of Exchange\n\nBaudrillard’s rhetorical method can be understood through the metaphor of a two-sided game between what he calls appearance and disappearance. Appearance and disappearance describe the two theories of language that Baudrillard outlines as the materialist, or representational, theory and the anti-materialist, or exterminatory, theory. The materialist theory creates appearances, while the anti-materialist theory creates disappearances. Metaphorically, rhetoric facilitates a back-and-forth competition—or exchange—between the two sides engaged in the game. Baudrillard draws upon the two-sided game metaphor when he implores writers “to play the whole game,” or to play in both appearances and disappearances (Baudrillard Live 181). He declares: “You’ve got to be able to make them appear as well as disappear; to play the whole game. Writing is nothing but that” (Baudrillard Live 181).\n\nBaudrillard remains adamant in his view that writing involves both appearance and disappearance, so much so that he admits that his own writing attempts “to make things appear or disappear” (Baudrillard Live 182). On the side of appearance, Baudrillard partakes in writing as the practice is conventionally understood by assuming a place as a knowing subject who creates meaning.¹⁵ In many instances, it is the meaning that he makes as a writer that elicits highly unfavorable receptions from readers. Readers are familiar with writing as appearance and implicitly understand this side of the game as\n\n¹⁵ As Gerry Coulter notes in The Baudrillard Dictionary, when Baudrillard’s “writing produced ‘meaning’ it was to ‘play meaning against the system itself’” (“Writing” 240).\nan act of meaning making; they, therefore, expect Baudrillard to play the game of writing by the rules of representation. As Baudrillard notes, “[e]veryone prefers to lend credence to reality, to sincerity, to the honesty of writing” (Fragments: Cool Memories 7). Readers expect that his writing will be a straightforward, mostly effortless read (Cool Memories II 17-8). They look for the content, the meaning. Problems arise when the meaning of Baudrillard’s writing is so outrageous that readers simply cannot get past it—the meaning sticks with them; it remains with them; the meaning becomes the remainder of Baudrillard’s writing. Baudrillard is aware of this risk, but he seems to consider this risk inherent to this side of the writing game.\n\nAppearance is the conventional side of the writing game and can become so conventional that it is boringly commonplace—so much so that Baudrillard refers to it as banal. Appearance’s conventionality contributes to what Baudrillard calls an “impatience with writing” and allows him to suggest that appearance participates in the accelerated production processes which permeate society (Cool Memories II 17-8). A connection exists for Baudrillard between conventionality and efficiency. He intimates that appearance has seized upon overwrought conventionality and has cultivated an expedient shorthand that works to anticipate; its purpose is not to merely make meaning, but rather to make meaning appear self-evident.16 The shorthand of appearance leaves no time for the writer to explain, convince, or predict, for time displaces the writer as a knowing subject, dates writing, and renders thought insufficient. Appearance aims only for the rapid production of meaning, a “precession of thought which has no other aim [fin] than to precipitate events [precipiter les choses]” (Cool Memories II 17-8). Excessively\n\n16 Since the purpose of appearance, as Baudrillard explains, “is never proof,” the shorthand of appearance is not a logical shorthand (Cool Memories II 17-8); it is neither the shorthand that appears in an Aristotelian enthymeme, nor the shorthand that undergirds a Toulmin warrant.\nconventional and rapidly profuse, appearance attempts to precede events, and writing that works predominantly in appearance is both banal and uneventful.\n\nOn the other side of the writing game, disappearance, Baudrillard writes in order to obliterate meaning and remove himself from the position of the subject (Art 33). Most readers do not typically understand writing as working against meaning and, consequently, this side of the writing game proceeds undetected. Baudrillard even admits that, although readers “thoroughly understand the rules of production,” readers do not understand “the rules of this particular game” (Baudrillard Live 180). Rather than flaunting the subject, writing as disappearance requires the isolation of the object (Art 34). Instead of representing reality, writing as disappearance both provokes and challenges reality (Baudrillard Live 205). Most readers, if for no other reason than habit, interpret disappearance as appearance. Confusion ensues when Baudrillard’s readers do not detect this side of the game and mistakenly consider provocation to be gross mis-representation. However, if readers do not preoccupy themselves with meaning and if the writer executes disappearance successfully, no meaning will remain. As Baudrillard says of disappearance, “it leaves no traces (when it is done successfully)” (Fragments: Cool 59).\n\nWhereas appearance is characterized by hasty shorthand that unites the banal and the uneventful to make meaning, disappearance is characterized by radical invention that mounts an extreme challenge to meaning. According to Baudrillard, the role of writing that predominantly deals in disappearance is to go to extremes (Baudrillard Live 180). Disappearance abandons the concept of the knowing subject and instead embraces the radicality of the object (Baudrillard Live 182). Most simply, disappearance defies\nconvention in order to challenge meaning making. As Baudrillard explains, this side of the act of writing is “another game, in the sense that it’s the invention of another, antagonistic, world” (Paroxysm 31-2). Disappearance, according to Baudrillard, constitutes an event, because it breaks with and radically offends convention. This side of the writing game, says Baudrillard, “has a more offensive action” and it “constitutes an event in a world where there are no longer any events because everything’s already in the programme” (Paroxysm 31-2).\n\nAlthough Baudrillard often discusses his dominant rhetorical method through metaphors, including the metaphor of the two-sided game, he also discusses exchange more directly. In the next section, I examine one of these more direct discussions. In particular, I turn to Nicholas Zurbrugg’s 1993 interview of Baudrillard. The Zurbrugg interview is significant both for the scope and the depth with which Baudrillard discusses his rhetorical method.\n\nExchange as a Method, Disappearance as a Move\n\nRhetorical method is a concept that is not constrained to compositions of a particular type, such as written compositions. Rather, rhetorical method is a concept that describes processes that can stretch across many different kinds of compositions, including written, spoken, photographic, and even multimodal compositions. Baudrillard’s 1993 remarks to Zurbrugg clarify the ability of one rhetorical method to guide many different kinds of compositions. In this interview, Zurbrugg questions Baudrillard about the relationship between his writing and his photography and Baudrillard indicates that exchange applies to written compositions as well as\nphotographic compositions. The interview moves from a discussion of Baudrillard’s initial interest in photography to a consideration of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method. Ultimately, the discussion reveals the dominant procedure that guides Baudrillard’s written and photographic compositions—the rhetorical method of exchange.\n\nAs Baudrillard’s remarks in the Zurbrugg interview indicate, rhetorical methods are not necessarily realized by the rhetors who deploy them. Baudrillard’s experiences as a writer and a photographer illustrate my claim that rhetorical methods may proceed tacitly, explicitly, or somewhere in between. For example, Baudrillard explains that he “came to photography as a kind of diversion or hobby” (Art 32). Initially, he considered his writing and his photography to be unrelated. Photography “offered an alternative to writing” and, in his opinion, it “had no connection with writing” (32). However, he eventually came to “realize that there was a relation between the activity of theoretical writing, and the activity of photography” (34). Although he previously viewed the two acts of composition as unrelated, he later recognized that “in fact it’s the same thing—it’s the same process”—that writing and photography were guided by the same overarching “mental process”—that a single rhetorical method guided both kinds of compositions (34).\n\nAs he explains it, the process that guides his writing and his photography is exchange. In his compositions, Baudrillard aims to create a rhetorical space that facilitates perpetual exchange between appearance and disappearance, subjectivity and objectivity. His rhetoric works to create movement by engaging both sides in the game. According to Baudrillard, in both kinds of compositions he attempts “to make the object appear or disappear as a concept, and to make the concept appear or disappear as a\nsubject” (Art 33). His compositions attempt to facilitate an exchange relationship between the materialist theory of language and the anti-materialist theory of language, and he acknowledges that this method is more difficult in written composition when compared to photographic composition. According to Baudrillard, written compositions force a writer into “a subjectivity” as “a producer of meaning” (33). Thus, Baudrillard must challenge subjectivity and meaning-making more forcefully in written discourse. However, exchange comes more easily in the photographic act that, by way of its media, seems to lend itself to the capturing of the object. Baudrillard contends that with “photography it is considerably easier to make the object appear, and to disappear as a subject” (33). With either photography or writing, Baudrillard’s rhetorical method is a process by which he works to initiate and sustain exchange between the materialist theory of language and the anti-materialist theory of language, the subject and the object, appearance and disappearance.\n\nBaudrillard’s rhetorical method of exchange should not, however, be considered inconsistent with his rhetorical products. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, critics often receive Baudrillardian rhetoric as overwhelmingly dealing in disappearance or producing obscure rhetoric that means nothing. Here, Mike Gane’s description of Baudrillard’s writing as “follow[ing] lines of argument without concession to their limit” is emblematic of the consensus among scholars that Baudrillardian rhetoric challenges meaning and convention (Baudrillard: Critical 3). While I agree that much of Baudrillardian rhetoric deals in disappearance, I caution that this propensity to deal in disappearance must be considered in terms of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method. Baudrillard suggests that the two-sided game of exchange is monopolized by appearance,\nmeaning-making, and representation. Therefore, much of his rhetoric champions disappearance so as to strongly challenge appearance and reinstate exchange between the pair. Disappearance is thus a move in service of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method; it is a sub-process of the larger process. When Baudrillard champions disappearance, he can be viewed as employing a move that resembles the classic sophistic move of making “the weaker seem the better cause” or “the weaker cause appear the stronger” (Aristotle §1402a; Isocrates §15). The way in which his rhetoric deals in disappearance—the way in which it offends convention, questions assumptions, exceeds logical limits, and ruptures value systems—is a radical challenge to meaning that aims to initiate and sustain exchange by bolstering disappearance’s rhetorical role.\n\nIn the Zurbrugg interview, Baudrillard outlines disappearance as involving three steps: objectification, isolation, and analysis (Art 34). The first step in the move known as disappearance is objectification. Baudrillard’s notion of objectification should not be conflated with an objective or neutral approach. Rather, it should be understood as an embrace of the object over the subject, and the dissociation of the subject with knowledge. In this first step, the rhetor abandons the subject for the object. The rhetor tries “to remove [him or her]self from the position of the subject,” and Baudrillard suggests that this removal entails an admission by the rhetor that she or he will “no longer be the subject of knowledge” (33). Often, this first step requires the invention of a scenario that removes the rhetor as a knowing subject. In the dialogue between Baudrillard and Zurbrugg, Baudrillard agrees with Zurbrugg’s description of this step as an “objective meditation” (34). The second step in disappearance is isolation. In this step, the rhetor creates what Baudrillard refers to as an “empty space” (34). Baudrillard’s\ndiscussion of this empty space suggests that this is the step in disappearance where the rhetor severs ties to materiality, context, reality, and reference. This empty space suspends the object wholly in illusion and it comprises a crucial component in disappearance for Baudrillard. He describes the similarities behind his photography and his writing as “isolating something in a kind of empty space” (34). The third step in disappearance is analysis. Baudrillard likens the analysis that occurs in this final step to “irradiation” and he remains adamant in his view that analysis is not interpretation, noting: “I don’t interpret anything” (34). His comparison of analysis to irradiation emphasizes two points. First, when Baudrillard’s rhetoric favors disappearance, he is sanitizing the isolated object of the values, status, and materialist logic which infest it, just as food is irradiated to rid it of harmful bacteria. Second, he is emphasizing the radical nature of disappearance by suggesting that disappearance will let the object go to its extreme. For Baudrillard, taking an object to its extreme risks the destruction of that object, just as irradiation has been used to exterminate objects—objectified humans included.\n\nThe three steps of disappearance—objectification, isolation, and analysis—assume importance in Baudrillard’s later work. As Baudrillard observed the increasing and unchecked modes of production in society, he mobilized a more radical kind of disappearance more frequently in his writing, equating disappearance with the aphoristic short form. Scholars such as Francois L’Yvonnet have observed that Baudrillard’s writing “evolved towards aphorism” (Fragments: Conversations 21), and indeed Baudrillard’s later texts, including America, the Cool Memories series, Impossible Exchange, and Screened Out constitute aphoristic texts that seem to closely adhere to the\nthree steps of disappearance so as to work against the production and accumulation of knowledge. These texts assemble disjointed paragraphs and gather arrays of sentences. For instance, a single entry in *Cool Memories I* reads: “Reversibility, like that of day and night, of all the concepts at the equatorial heart of the system: this paradoxical, derisory, indefensible and therefore impregnable position is the bitter privilege of phantom rhetorics” (*Cool Memories I* 102). Entries like this one challenge the knowing subject’s ability to connect this language to a meaning making system and interpret it. In this entry, Baudrillard has objectified language and isolated it. He refrains from building a totalized body of ideas (*Fragments: Conversations* 23). Rather, his writing scatters the subject’s grasp on knowledge and allows the entry to sit in isolation. It is bordered only by the white space of the page and it seems disconnected from the entries before and after it. This isolated entry eschews interpretation, but invites analysis. It is a fragment that can only be broken down further.\n\nWriting in the genre of the aphorism is one rhetorical move through which Baudrillard mobilizes disappearance in order to play the game of exchange. A notable difference exists between Baudrillard’s aphoristic writing like *Cool Memories* and his theoretical writings like *Symbolic Exchange and Death*. Baudrillard observes that “[i]n the aphorism, the fragment, there is the desire to slim things down as much as possible [to the point where] you no longer grasp the same things; objects are transformed when you see them in detail, in a kind of elliptical void” (*Fragments: Conversations* 22). For Baudrillard, the aphorism comprises “a sacrilege against the canonical form of the well-argued essay” and constitutes “a violence done to discourse, but not to language” (23). Fittingly, an aphorism in the very beginning of *Cool Memories I* declares: “The real joy\nof writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word, to sacrifice everything for an artificial effect or an acceleration into the void” (Cool Memories I 29).\n\nBaudrillard often compares his aphoristic texts to photographs, thereby implying that these texts and his photographs are guided by similar compositional processes. According to Baudrillard, “[t]here’s the same work on detail and on the fragmentary in writing aphoristically or doing photography” (Fragments: Conversations 22). Just as Baudrillard draws upon the genre of the aphorism to execute the move of disappearance, he also draws upon photography—the technology of the camera, lens, and film—to execute the move of disappearance. Baudrillard contends that photography “is the art of eradicating everything that interposes itself between one and the world—the absence of the world presented in each detail, reinforced by each detail” (Art 29). Photography, he says, constitutes a process “by which one simultaneously expropriates and eradicates oneself” (31). According to Baudrillard, during the photographic process, photography makes the world become an object by way of the photographic image. The photographic image stands apart from other images because it is analogical, not virtual, real, numerical, or digital. Baudrillard explains that, as an analog, the photograph depends upon its relationship with its negative (Art 31).\n\nBaudrillard offers many examples of the photographic image that sustains disappearance, as he was an avid amateur photographer. For example, consider Baudrillard’s photograph “St. Clement.” This photograph not only appears as a color plate in Art and Artefact, but it also serves as the cover art for the Verso edition of Paroxysm. It focuses acutely on the details of the objects captured by the image: water\nand rust, a car and a few bubbles. Framed and cropped by the camera, this photograph isolates the object in a way that cannot be interpreted, in a way that resists the viewer’s attempt to make knowledge. “St. Clement” proves a photograph that resists interpretation and the production of meaning—it “restores the object to the immobility and the silence of the image” (Art 31). In “St. Clement” as in Cool Memories I, Baudrillard mobilizes disappearance in order to play the game of exchange. In each kind of composition, he follows a uniform sub-process of objectification, isolation, and analysis. His compositions constitute responses to the proliferation of meaning making texts. Thus, photographic texts, like their aphoristic counterparts, are to be understood as uniformly embodying disappearance in order to facilitate exchange. Texts, such as “St. Clement,” undeniably align with the object, the anti-materialist theory of language, and disappearance in order to play the two-sided game of exchange.\n\nWhile it might be tempting and perhaps critically popular to view Baudrillard’s sophistic move and the propensity of his later work to deal in disappearance as a rhetorical method in and of itself, Baudrillard’s final works undeniably position disappearance as a move in service of exchange. Notably, the steps of disappearance—objectification, isolation, and analysis—executed by Baudrillard’s aphoristic texts and his photographs do not carry through to Baudrillard’s more recent texts, Why among them. Most conspicuously, Why abandons the aphorism as well as the photographic image. The text of Why is presented as a short argument and it combines Baudrillard’s writing with digital images composed by Alain Willaume, resulting in what Toby Lichtig of the Times Literary Supplement describes as “a handsomely produced post-structuralist booklet.” More subtly, however, Why reveals that Baudrillard remains consistent in his rhetorical\nmethod, even as the moves he executes in order to facilitate exchange subtly shift. As I argue in the following section, Baudrillard’s rhetorical move of disappearance shifts in accordance with the posthumanist turn in thought, but his rhetorical method of exchange remains the same.\n\nExchange in *Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?*\n\nA rhetorical method is not the same thing as a rhetorical move, and Baudrillard’s *Why* makes this distinction clear. Guided by the rhetorical method of exchange, this text revises the three-step rhetorical move known as disappearance so as to respond to the posthumanist turn in thought. Much more than a mere recapitulation of Baudrillard’s well-worn arguments and far from a dejected admission of his own theoretical defeat, this text marks the triumph of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method.\n\nWritten in January of 2007 just a few months before Baudrillard’s death, *Why* comprises a text that, as its title suggests, is focused on disappearance. However, there is little agreement among its reviewers as to how Baudrillard is working with disappearance in this text. As I previously noted, Lichtig opines that the book’s “effect is one of obscurity in all its senses.” Noting that Baudrillard juggles binaries with his “characteristic élan,” Lichtig implies that Baudrillard fails to offer anything new in *Why. What Lichtig perceives as a rehashing of old material does not, however, diminish the book’s provocativeness. Lichtig writes: “If this essay reads like a potted summary of Baudrillard's late oeuvre (and influences) then this does not detract from its ability to stimulate the mind.” For Lichtig, Baudrillard treats disappearance as he does in his previous work—as one half of a binary to be juggled.\nThe sentiment that Baudrillard invokes disappearance in a characteristic manner also pervades John Armitage’s review of Why for the Times Higher Education. Armitage, a Baudrillardian scholar, asserts that Why should be received “not as a farewell essay, but as a practically spiritual text on the appearance, disappearance and reappearance of everyday objects.” In large part, Armitage’s review surveys the vast range of topics upon which Baudrillard comments in Why—technology, globalization, art, photography, and terrorism—and, thus, suggests that the text should be appreciated on account of Baudrillard’s topical musings. Armitage’s review positions Baudrillard as the characteristic champion of disappearance and looks favorably upon Baudrillard’s text. As it concludes, Armitage claims that “if we seek to read [Baudrillard’s] work accurately, we have to do so in view of its disappearance.”\n\nIn a third review of Why, Baudrillardian scholar Gerry Coulter contends that the way in which Baudrillard addresses disappearance actually is quite uncharacteristic of Baudrillard’s other writings. Coulter’s review focuses on the ubiquity of disappearance in Why, specifically Baudrillard’s description of the technologically-driven disappearance of the subject. According to Coulter, the central argument in Why is that digitalized networks are reducing diversity among subjects, reducing subjects down to a code, and expelling humanity. Noting that “[d]isappearance is everywhere today but without a telos,” Coulter’s reading of Why is both ominous and pessimistic (“Last”). It is also forlorn; where Coulter would usually locate exchange, or what he prefers to call reversibility, in Baudrillard’s writing, he finds none in Why (“Jean”). Ultimately, Coulter argues that in Why Baudrillard abandons his trademark allegiance to exchange. Coulter writes that “in this book Baudrillard, unlike the Baudrillard we have known in all of his\nother books, has […] lost faith in reversibility” (“Last”). Coulter suggests that Baudrillard’s treatment of disappearance in Why is consistent with his previous work, while his treatment of exchange is inconsistent.\n\nBy my own reading, Coulter’s findings seem transposed, in that Baudrillard’s deployment of exchange remains consistent with his previous work, while his treatment of disappearance subtly shifts from his previous treatments. In contradistinction to Lichtig, Armitage, and Coulter, I find Baudrillard’s discussion of disappearance in Why substantially different than any of his prior treatments of it.\n\nDual Disappearances\n\nIt seems obvious, perhaps indisputably so, that Baudrillard focuses upon disappearance in Why. Baudrillard, for his part, describes the central question in his text as “a question of disappearance” (Why 9). However, Baudrillard’s brief, seventy-four-word introduction to Why illustrates that he is particularly concerned with the posthuman condition, or the disappearance of the human. In his introductory line, Baudrillard commands: “Let us speak, then, of the world from which human beings have disappeared” (9). By summoning his audience to discourse, Baudrillard focuses on the rhetorical activity of theorizing the posthuman condition. The speakings, and writings, and general discourses of posthumanism are the targets of this text. The problem, as Baudrillard explains it, is that the human species has “invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature’s law” (10). Here, invention can with good reason be understood in the technological sense, as it is in the reviews of Coulter and Armitage. However, I argue that this use of invention can also be understood in the\nrhetorical sense, as in the invention of a posthumanist discourse that makes the human disappear. By ostensibly making the human subject disappear, the discourses of posthumanism pose a significant problem to Baudrillard’s rhetorical method of exchange, in that they threaten to erase one side of the exchange game—the side of appearance.\n\nIn *Why*, Baudrillard distinguishes between two kinds of disappearance. The first kind of disappearance is the disappearance of the subject orchestrated by the discourses of posthumanism. This kind of disappearance is more accurately categorized as appearance, for it is a calculated disappearance of the subject in order to make more meaning; there is no challenge in this kind of disappearance. This first kind of disappearance is what Baudrillard refers to as the “great disappearance” (*Why* 28). According to Baudrillard, the “great disappearance” is the end “of a linear trajectory, from origin to end, from cause to effect, from birth to death, from appearance to disappearance” (20). Baudrillard argues that this first kind of disappearance is the inevitable outcome of appearance, that this kind of disappearance “is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-in obsolescence, of the human race’s fulfillment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge” (16). His use of the term *disappearance* to refer to the product of appearance is highly uncharacteristic of Baudrillardian rhetoric, and it constitutes a move that departs from his previous work.\n\nThe second kind of disappearance is the kind of disappearance found throughout Baudrillard’s writings. This second kind of disappearance is what he refers to as the “art of disappearance,” or “disappearance as form” (*Why* 10; 31). The art of disappearance challenges meaning and reality. It seeks to dissolve values, ideologies, and goals (21).\nThe art of disappearance comprises one side of the two-sided game that is exchange. As he explains, this second kind of disappearance is inextricably linked to “concepts and language” (11). For Baudrillard, once a concept or a thing is named or represented, it begins to disappear. He suggests that from the very moment that representation, or appearance, works to make meaning, disappearance begins challenging meaning. Playing upon this point about representation, Baudrillard contends that “the real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at the very same time it begins to exist” (11). He further mentions that the human search for knowledge, a search that assigns value and distributes meaning is simultaneously “a process of dissolution” (11). He also states: “It is when a thing is beginning to disappear that the concept appears” (12). This second kind of disappearance, the art of disappearance, is a kind of disappearance that corresponds to the “analytical grid” outlined by Baudrillard as involving objectification, isolation, analysis (31; Art 34).\n\nThroughout Why, Baudrillard distinguishes between these kinds of disappearances through the understated yet detectable strategies of modification and contrast. Most commonly, he modifies the word disappearance so as to rename it as either the first kind or the second kind. He modifies his references to the first kind of disappearance with the words negative (as in the negative drive which seeks to exceed the negative), mode and product (as in “It is here that we see that the mode of disappearance of the human […] is precisely the product of an internal logic”), and great (as in “the great disappearance”) (Why 16; 16; 28). He modifies his references to the second kind of disappearance with the words positive (as in “positive disappearances”), form (“disappearance as a form”), and art (as in “an art of disappearance”) (28; 31; 17). These modifications become\nparticularly evident in passages where Baudrillard combines them with contrast. For instance, take the passage “One might argue, *alternatively*, that there have been some positive disappearances” (28; emphasis added). This line occurs after Baudrillard describes the “great disappearance.” He uses the word *alternatively* to signal a contrast between the two kinds of disappearance; the great disappearance and the art of disappearance, the first of which is negative and the second of which is positive. In other instances, he deploys the word *but* in the same way:\n\n> All this remains confined still within an evolutionary perspective that sees everything in terms of a linear trajectory, from origin to end, from cause to effect, from birth to death, from appearance to disappearance.\n\n> *But* disappearance may be conceived of differently: as a singular event and the object of a specific desire, the desire to no longer be there, which is not negative at all. (20-1; emphasis added)\n\nHere, the word *but* functions as the contrastive pivot that allows Baudrillard to transition from the first, negative, and productive kind of disappearance to the second, positive, and artistic kind of disappearance.\\(^\\text{17}\\)\n\nAdmittedly, Baudrillard’s use of modification and contrast in *Why* are so understated that they can be easily missed. However, his somewhat ambiguous shuttling between these two kinds of disappearance only serves to emphasize the significant problem that posthumanist discourse poses to Baudrillard’s rhetorical method. Just as Baudrillard seems to collapse the distinction between these two kinds of disappearance,\n\n\\(^{17}\\) For more on the use of opposition in dense theoretical writing, see Cathy Birkenstein’s “Reconsiderations: We Got the Wrong Gal: Rethinking the ‘Bad’ Academic Writing of Judith Butler” in *College English*. Birkenstein’s analysis of Judith Butler’s writing references John Schilb’s discussion of the word *but* as a word that helps the critic establish exigency (282).\nso too does the discourse of posthumanism seem to collapse the two sides of exchange. Posthumanism moves beyond the meaning-making human subject and, as such, erodes the fundamental premise upon which the side of appearance is built. Baudrillard insightfully observes that the very project of posthumanism could be considered to be a project of disappearance and, indeed, posthumanism mobilizes disappearance as a rhetorical move in order to extinguish exchange. The discourses of posthumanism abandon the subject and, instead, embrace the object. Thus, they engage in objectification (the first step in the art of disappearance previously outlined by Baudrillard), but they do not perform any isolation or analysis. Stopping short of mobilizing a positive disappearance by executing its final two steps, the knowledge-seekers who once embraced the human subject have become knowledge-seekers who masquerade as the object. As Baudrillard surmises, “[o]ur greatest adversaries now threaten us with their disappearance” (Why 28). Baudrillard’s ambiguous shuttling between the two kinds of disappearance can be understood as an illustration of the significant obstacle that posthumanism poses to his rhetorical method. For Baudrillard, discourses of posthumanism attempt to erase the subject and embrace the object; they tilt the rhetorical playing field so far towards disappearance that exchange would be extinguished.\n\nHowever, he argues that even when the playing field seems to tilt toward disappearance exchange persists. For Baudrillard, no amount of terminological masquerading will change rhetoric’s position at the juncture of the two theories of language, the one materialist and the other anti-materialist. Even in posthumanism, both appearance and disappearance persist, and so too does rhetoric. In Why, Baudrillard revises the rhetorical move of disappearance by altering its first step of objectification. In\norder to work through the posthumanist obstacle, he seems content to forego\nobjectification—an “objective meditation”—and trade objectification with obfuscation.\n\nAs the discourse of posthumanism illustrates, the art of disappearance requires more than\nsimply abandoning the subject for the object. Baudrillard suggests that the subject-object\nbinary within which exchange thrives might actually need to be complicated. In Why, he\ncomplicates that relationship before he proceeds to isolate exchange. According to\nBaudrillard, posthumanism’s disappearing subject “gives way to a diffuse, floating,\ninsubstantial subjectivity, an ectoplasm that envelops everything and transforms\neverything into an immense sounding board for a disembodied, empty consciousness—all\nthings radiating out from a subjectivity without object” (Why 27). Here, Baudrillard\ncontends that, even when the subject disappears, subjectivity remains. Moreover, by\ncomplicating the relationship, he isolates exchange. The diffuse subjectivity that remains\nafter the subject has disappeared assaults the object even more insidiously; the exchange\nbetween the subject and the object, appearance and disappearance, the materialist theory\nof language and the anti-materialist theory of language continues—and so does\nBaudrillard’s rhetorical method.\n\nAmbivalence, Rhetoric, and Exchange\n\nIt is my contention that Why constitutes a text in which Baudrillard theorizes his\nrhetorical method. In response to the posthuman condition, he shifts away from his\nsophistic tendencies as the champion of disappearance and, in this text, positions himself\nas the protector of exchange. He mobilizes exchange and places Why largely in the\nambivalent rhetorical space created by it. Baudrillard accomplishes this feat partly\nthrough the dual and often ambiguous use of the word *disappear*, and partly through his deployment of the rhetorical question. As Genosko notes, the ambivalence of Baudrillard’s texts have always been one of their distinguishing marks: “It is not merely that one might respond ambivalently to them, but that they are themselves full of ambivalence” (*McLuhan* 79). *Why*, however, strikes me as significantly more ambivalent than Baudrillard’s previous work.\n\nCentral to my reading of *Why* as a text more squarely positioned inside of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method is the “stress” that he places upon “the total ambiguity of our relation to the real and its disappearance” (*Why* 32). Baudrillard makes his point about ambiguity in his conclusion, which comes at his text’s midpoint. In this conclusion, he asks: “According to the official version, we worship the real and the reality principle, but—and this is the source of all the current suspense—is it, in fact, the real that we worship, or its disappearance?” (32). This question is a provocative question and one that Baudrillard will ask again at the end of his text; neither time will it be answered. In this instance, Baudrillard resigns himself to ambiguity and declares that a “contradictory two-fold postulate cannot, in any way, be resolved” (32). As if the placement of his conclusion in the middle of his text was not emphatic enough, Baudrillard’s refusal to offer any resolution resolutely signals the text’s ambivalent position.\n\nThe second time that Baudrillard poses this question occurs at the end of a long extended example. This example constitutes the example most conducive to pessimistic readings of *Why* and, in it, Baudrillard examines photography with regard to the rise of digital imaging in the posthuman condition. After noting that the place of photography comprises “one tiny example of what is happening on a massive scale in all fields—\nparticularly in the fields of thought, concept, language and representation,” he traces photography in terms of exchange (Why 39). He then forwards a number of assertions and reaches “the limit case,” what he describes as “an unstoppable series of shots” (55). Upon reaching this limit case, Baudrillard appears to succumb to the digital. Indeed, Baudrillard’s assertion that “it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death” lends credence to Coulter’s perspective that, in Why, “Baudrillard’s hope (in reversibility) faded” (62; “Last”). After offering this dire assertion, Baudrillard proceeds to list a set of four “troubling paradoxical questions,” the fourth of which echoes his earlier question. The abbreviated questions, and their corollaries, are:\n\n1. Is everything doomed to disappear—or, more precisely, hasn’t everything already disappeared? [He connects this question with the question: Why is there nothing rather than something?]\n\n2. Why isn’t everything universal?\n\n3. Are we not far less fascinated by the real than by its vanishing, its ineluctable disappearance?\n\n4. How does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? [He follows this question with two others: (1) How can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it—not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? (2) What is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnerability to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves?] (Why 63-4)\nAlthough he poses these questions, he exerts no effort in answering them. They are, for him, the questions of the posthuman condition. He explains that these questions occur “at the outer limits” of the “great disappearance” or “systemic disappearance” (63). Baudrillard admits that these questions are “insoluble”; that they cannot be answered, only avoided (64).\n\nTo avoid these unanswerable questions, Baudrillard turns to what he calls duality, what Coulter refers to as reversibility, and what I have been naming exchange. Exchange, for Baudrillard, maintains the human in the face of the posthuman. Exchange asserts both subject and object, locking both in a two-sided game. Not only does exchange attest to both appearance and disappearance, but it also facilitates the movement between the two. With exchange as their method, the questions do not require final answers or ultimate resolution. Rather, exchange permits these questions—these rhetorical questions—to rest in silence.\n\nIn Why, Baudrillard exploits an “eternal” correspondence between humanity and the rhetorical question in order to confirm the viability of his rhetorical method. Baudrillard’s description of exchange, what he calls “the inviolable golden rule of duality,” suggests that the ambivalent rhetorical space created by exchange creates an affinity between the rhetorical question and human undertakings, in that both are suspended and thwarted by exchange (Why 67).\n\nOn the one hand, exchange thwarts human endeavors to mass produce, reproduce, and synthesize. Exchange always holds that some form or some thing will challenge any attempt to synthesize, reconcile, or integrate it into that mass. Baudrillard writes that exchange “eternally thwarts human undertakings (all based on synthesis, integrality and\nthe deliberate forgetting of all refractory forms, of everything that cannot or will not be integrated or reconciled…” (Why 67). Here, Baudrillard’s language is notably more ambiguous than in his previous works. Yet, in contradistinction to Coulter’s reading that Baudrillard is conveying his lost hope for exchange, this more muted language should be understood as response to posthumanism. Prior to posthumanist discourse, Baudrillard would have most assuredly described these things as the seductive objects that challenge the subject’s productive drive, as the disappearance that challenges the appearance, or as the anti-matter that challenges the matter. But, in this statement, his language departs from his well-worn binaries in accordance with the ambivalence of exchange.\n\nOn the other hand, exchange suspends the rhetorical question in silence, thwarting its ability to be answered. Exchange facilitates a circular movement between the making of meaning and the challenging of meaning and it is this movement that suspends the rhetorical question in silence. A question, as Edwin Black explains, “is rhetorical if it is either so profound that answering it is obviously impossible, or so superficial that answering it is impossibly obvious”; however, in either case, the “rhetorical question uses the auditor’s silence for its own confirmation” (Rhetorical Questions 2). Here, in Black’s explanation of a rhetorical question, there is an ambivalence that envelopes the question. The silence that confirms a rhetorical question does not confirm whether the question was profound or superficial, whether it challenged meaning or made meaning, whether it ruptured conventional values or banally perpetuated those values. In the ambivalent silence that greets a rhetorical question, exchange assumes prominence as meaning is negotiated in a way that is completely internal to the text. There is no response from the reader, the listener, the viewer, but ambivalence persists.\nReturning to the text of *Why*, some kinds of resolution seem possible while other kinds of resolution seem impossible. It can be resolved, in my view, that this is a text that responds to the supposed disappearance heralded by posthumanism. It can further be resolved that the effect of this text is anything but what Lichtig categorized as “one of obscurity in all its senses.” On the contrary, *Why* is an extremely methodical text that makes sense in terms of Baudrillardian exchange. Finally, it can be resolved that this text does not, as Gerry Coulter would have it, profess Baudrillard’s lost hope in exchange. Rather, *Why* is a text that marks the triumph of the rhetorical method of exchange, even when confronted by the posthumanist disappearance of the subject. A thorough consideration of Baudrillard’s rhetorical method shows that Baudrillard is not an obscure stylist or a forlorn theorist. Instead, he was a highly methodological and indefatigably consistent rhetor.\n\nOne final example should serve to prove my point. The largest question in the text is found in the book’s title: *Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?* When considered in terms of Baudrillard’s sophistic tendencies, the title question functions as the contrarian’s pejorative inquiry. Auditors can almost hear the skeptic’s taunt: “Well then, why hasn’t everything already disappeared?” When considered in terms of the posthuman disappearance of the subject, the question functions as exchange’s hope. Since things haven’t already disappeared, one could deduce that the subject remains and rhetorical exchange—however depleted—persists.\n\nAmong the many other interpretations of this title question, there is one interpretation that is, in my opinion, still more compelling. Baudrillard ends the book with three sentences:\nIn the beginning was the word. It was only afterwards that the Silence came. The end itself has disappeared… (Why 70)\n\nIn these three sentences, he provides readers with a tripartite definition of a rhetorical question: (1) Question; (2) Silence; and (3) Ambivalence. Yet, this definition also explains the position of the title question in relationship to the rest of the text. The title question, or “the word” in the beginning of this text, is met with silence and is thereby confirmed as a rhetorical question. Thus, when the title question is considered to be a rhetorical question, it proves that exchange persists—that rhetoric engages the materialist theory of language and the anti-materialist theory of language in a relationship that internally negotiates meaning. As with any rhetorical question, the title question is a declarative that poses as an interrogative. In this case, the title question is a declaration about the persistence of exchange, but this declaration about rhetoric poses as a question about disappearance. This interpretation is the most compelling. As Black has observed of the rhetorical question, “it may be the most miniature of iterated persuasive patterns” (Rhetorical Questions 2).\nChapter 3:\nExtending Exchange: A Baudrillardian Approach to Rhetorical Criticism\n\nBaudrillard’s rhetorical method seizes upon his conception of writing as a two-sided game, with one side working to produce meaning and one side attempting to challenge meaning. As I emphasized in the previous chapter, Baudrillard refers to the former side as “appearance” and the latter side as “disappearance.” He further explains how the game of writing ought to be played. Theoretically, movement should occur between the two sides of the game. In other words, the rules of this game would have appearance and disappearance engaged in perpetual exchange of meaning. However in contemporary practice, very little exchange occurs between the two sides of writing. Baudrillard tells us that contemporary writing is a lopsided game in which appearance repeatedly wins out over disappearance.\\(^\\text{18}\\) Instead of a circular movement between the making of meaning and the challenging of meaning, the movement of writing is overwhelmingly linear, with the side of appearance driving hard toward singular meaning. In effect, disappearance sits out the game.\n\nTo re-engage both sides in the writing game and to reinstate an exchange between appearance and disappearance, Baudrillard often champions disappearance. In doing so, he employs a move that resembles the classic sophistic move of making “the weaker seem the better cause” or “the weaker cause appear the stronger” (Aristotle §1402a; Isocrates §15).\\(^\\text{19}\\) His writings radically challenge meaning in order to bolster disappearance’s role in writing; they offend convention by questioning tacit assumptions,\\(^\\text{18}\\) Noting that “Everyone prefers to lend credence to reality to sincerity to the honesty of writing,” Baudrillard identifies a propensity in readers to consider writing in terms of the way in which it represents reality (Fragments: Cool Memories III 7).\\(^\\text{19}\\) All in-text citations of Antidosis have been taken from George Norlin’s 1929 translation, unless otherwise noted.\nexceeding logical limits, and rupturing value systems. As I argued in the previous chapter, the significant challenge that Baudrillard’s writing poses to convention and criticism must be understood as a rhetorical move deployed in the service of his larger rhetorical method. That rhetorical method is, in one word, exchange. \n\nThrough his rhetoric, he methodically works to exchange one meaning with another meaning. Baudrillard’s rhetorical method further manifests itself in genre. My discussion of his oeuvre in chapter two illustrates the way he increasingly favored the aphorism—a genre that enabled him to make chunks of texts literally disappear—as he dealt more and more in disappearance.\n\nBaudrillardian rhetoric aims to initiate exchange. In Baudrillardian terms, exchange is the free circulation of a text without logical or symbolic constraint—without fixed meaning, as it were. Unlike Aristotelian rhetoric, it is not preoccupied with persuasion. Unlike Burkean rhetoric, it is not concerned with identification. Instead, Baudrillardian rhetoric strives to create an ambivalent rhetorical space in which a text sheds its predetermined meaning. Baudrillard refers to this space as “a blind zone, in which everything is called into question again” (Passwords 15). The “blind zone” is the rhetorical space in which exchange occurs. Baudrillardian rhetoric emphasizes his understanding of a text’s function. He maintains that, no matter how strongly a text works to produce meaning, every text possesses a capacity to challenge meaning. By\n\n---\n\n20 Here, the word “reciprocity” would also suffice and, as Gerry Coulter argues in “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s “One Great Thought,” so would the word “reversibility.”\n21 With reference to Baudrillard’s The Evil Demon of Images, Coulter observes: “When his writing produced ‘meaning’ it was to ‘play that meaning against the system itself’” (The Baudrillard Dictionary 240). See also The Evil Demon of Images, page 41.\n22 Baudrillard explains that there is a joy to be found in disappearance and the aphorism. He writes: “the real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word, to sacrifice everything for an artificial effect or an acceleration into the void” (Cool Memories 129).\nchallenging meaning, a text becomes exchangeable. It becomes capable of circulating freely without restrictive value systems or binding logics, and that text facilitates a critical questioning not otherwise possible. Indeed, much of Baudrillard’s writing attempts to activate this potential for challenge by rupturing convention.\n\nRhetoric scholars can deploy Baudrillardian rhetoric as a critical framework through which they can contemplate a text’s potential to resist meaning. Critics who adopt a Baudrillardian perspective can consider the degree to which a text—in conjunction with its surrounding paratexts—radically breaks from convention and establishes “a blind zone” (*Passwords* 15). Critics can assess the degree to which a text does not participate in established value systems or adhere to dominant logics. They can evaluate the degree to which a text ruptures value and dissolves logics. They can appreciate the ways in which a text avoids capitulating to meaning-making systems and, instead, circulates in ambivalence. Critics recognize that a Baudrillardian approach positions rhetoric as an ambivalent venture.\n\nRhetorical critics can also deploy Baudrillardian rhetoric to challenge a text’s categorical function. Baudrillard suggests that the “deconstruction of value” that facilitates exchange blurs and muddies categorical distinctions and definitions (*Mirror* 43). Thus, Baudrillardian rhetoric challenges the two fundamental rhetorical moves described by Plato in the *Phaedrus*: definition and division (50-6). Baudrillard tells us that, in the “blind zone” of ambivalence, things once confined to their separate definitions are exchanged “in a kind of universal collusiveness of inseparable forms” (*Passwords* 15; 16-7). Here, the word “form” invokes Baudrillard’s rhetorical method, as I discussed in\n\n---\n\n23 Gerard Genette explains that a paratext functions as “a discourse that is fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary, and dedicated to the service of something other than itself” (12).\nchapter one. Yet, the examples that he provides to clarify his argument show that he uses the word “form” to refer to categorical definitions. He argues that things defined as categorically different—such as animals, humans, and divinities—can be exchanged (Passwords 16). In other words, after they have been propelled into a state of ambivalence, categorical meanings can be circulated, interrogated, and challenged. A Baudrillardian framework offers critics an additional approach to a rhetoric beyond representation, and this approach is especially applicable to texts with ambiguous or competing classifications (not the least of which might be competing genre classifications).\n\nIn the following sections, I illustrate the critical value of Baudrillardian rhetoric by applying this approach to two very different texts and their surrounding paratexts. Both phenomena involved a public putting a rhetor on trial for challenging established values. The first text, Isocrates’s *Antidosis*, constitutes a central text in the field of rhetorical studies and is especially noted for the way in which Isocrates endorses the civic value of a rhetorical education. Baudrillard’s poststructuralist rhetoric reveals how this classical text ruptures convention through the deployment of a language of credit. The rhetorical success of this text is further substantiated by a number of paratexts that confirm the way in which *Antidosis* resists classification. More controversial than canonical, James Frey’s *A Million Little Pieces* fails to rupture the conventional meaning-making system because it trades conventional notions of truth. A Baudrillardian approach to *A Million Little Pieces* and its paratexts demonstrates how its challenge was enfolded back into traditional conceptions of value. Analyzing these two texts in terms of Baudrillardian rhetoric not only suggests the applicability of this framework to a wide\nvariety of rhetorical phenomena, but it also suggests the need for rhetorical critics to reevaluate their understandings of public good.\n\nA Baudrillardian approach to both of these phenomena is particularly fitting for the way in which the public puts the rhetors—Isocrates and Frey—on trial for disrupting conventional notions of value. In texts like *For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign*, Baudrillard grapples with questions of value as they manifest themselves in conjunction with use value, monetary value, sign value, and symbolic exchange value. In the rhetorical phenomena that surround Isocrates’s *Antidosis* and Frey’s *A Million Little Pieces*, similar questions of value and similar manifestations of these questions occur. That is to say that, with respect to these two controversies, value occurs in relation to use, money, and signs, as well as in relation to exchange. In both of these phenomena, the public attempts to judge the value of Isocrates and Frey, as well as the value of their rhetoric, in terms of these nested manifestations of value. A Baudrillardian approach to these tangled rhetorical trials considers the more conventional manifestations of value—use, monetary, and sign—in terms of the larger value systems against which these two rhetors are tried.\n\nExchange in *Antidosis*\n\nWritten by an eighty-two year-old Isocrates in 354-3 BCE, *Antidosis* takes its title (which can be translated as “exchange” or “on the exchange”)\\(^{24}\\) from a legal procedure that a citizen could enact in the context of a complicated Athenian practice called the liturgy system. As Matthew R. Christ explains, the “well-being of the Athenian state\n\n\\(^{24}\\) Among others, Mirhady and Too, in 2000, translate “antidosis” as “exchange” (201). In 2008, however, Too translates “antidosis” as “on the exchange” (87).\ndepended largely upon its ability to harness the private resources and energy of the wealthy through a system of ‘liturgies’” (147). The Athenian liturgy system required particular citizens to sponsor public projects and compelled them to, for instance, underwrite a festival, fund a chorus, or subsidize athletic training (Too, A Commentary 5). In contemporary terms, the liturgy system could be viewed as a system that imposes a philanthropic tax on the wealthiest class of citizens. The only way a citizen could challenge the liturgy system was through the procedure that lends its name to Isocrates’s text.\n\nThe antidosis procedure challenged the liturgy system by proposing two kinds of exchanges: private exchanges and public exchanges. Typically, it began with a private exchange proposition, in which the citizen originally assigned the liturgy would challenge another citizen to perform the liturgy in his stead. This private exchange proposition suggested that the liturgy duty be exchanged between two citizens. If the citizens did not agree upon an exchange, then a second exchange proposition—predicated upon the assumption that the wealthiest citizen should perform the liturgy—suggested that the two citizens exchange estates. Distinct from these private exchange propositions, public exchanges occurred if the citizens failed to agree upon an exchange or if “difficulties arose during the exchange” (Christ 161). In these public exchanges, both citizens exchanged arguments in front of a jury. In Antidosis, Isocrates draws upon his\n\n---\n\n25 While discussing the antidosis procedure, Christ situates “the procedure in both its private and public stages” (165).\n26 Christ details “up to three stages” in the antidosis procedure, while Gabrielsen asserts “that the entire procedure consisted of two main stages that could (but need not) be coextensive: the antidosis-challenge itself, during which the man originally liable and his potential replacement might try to settle in private the issue of which of the two should discharge the service; and a legal hearing” (“Liturgy” 161, Financing 91).\nexperiences with such trials and employs the trial as a fictional frame for his longest extant piece of writing. \n\nCritical consensus maintains that *Antidosis* is a text largely concerned with representation. Critics most often read *Antidosis* as a lengthy attempt by Isocrates to positively portray both himself and his profession in response to slanderers, detractors, and sycophants. Josiah Ober summarizes these representational readings, observing that the “Isocrates of the *Antidosis* radiates confidence in his ability to change the minds of his jurors” and “vindicate him and his profession before the Athenian dēmos” (33). Critics who forward these interpretations often reference Isocrates’s assertion that *Antidosis*’s “real purpose” is to rectify the misperceptions of his character that result from his profession as a rhetoric educator (§13). Subsequently, many critics argue that this text functions to convey a particular understanding of Isocrates and rhetorical education. In these arguments, critics conceive of rhetorical success in terms of persuasion or identification. *Antidosis* either succeeds (1) because Isocrates has persuaded his audience to change their perceptions of him, his occupation, and his values, or (2) because he has encouraged them to identify with him, his occupation, and his values. From these perspectives, *Antidosis* is a text that attempts to settle the meaning, decide the appearance, and solidify the values of an individual, like Isocrates, or a profession, like rhetorical instruction.\n\n---\n\n27 Three times during his life, Isocrates was involved in the antidosis procedure, since a liturgy called a trierarchy had been leveled against him. The trierarchy asked Isocrates to finance, in some part, the Athenian navy. For a detailed investigation of trierarchies, see Gabrielsen’s *Financing the Athenian Fleet*. \n28 Norlin explains that Isocrates “conceived of dissipating […] prejudice against him by publishing” *Antidosis* (181). \n29 For example, in *Speaking for the Polis*, Takis Poulakos contends that Isocrates uses the form of apologia in the *Antidosis* as an alibi for a chance to recount his past accomplishments as an educator without being perceived as engaging in extravagant self-praise (93).\nBaudrillardian rhetoric suggests a third way in which Antidosis might succeed rhetorically and that way is through the rupture of meaning and the initiation of exchange. Baudrillardian rhetoric strives for neither persuasion, nor identification, nor persuasion through identification. From this perspective, rhetoric should not attempt to persuade audiences to accept a particular meaning, nor should it try to facilitate persuasion through audience identification. Instead, Baudrillardian rhetoric pushes its audience’s logics to extremes, ruptures its audience’s sense of convention, and enables the “deconstruction of value” (*Mirror* 43). As a rhetorical method, exchange remains unique for the way it endorses instability. Baudrillard’s ideal text participates in circulation without a clear meaning, without predetermined values, and without a binding logic. A text that would successfully initiate exchange would rupture the meaning-making system, and I argue that Antidosis is such a text. Antidosis proves a rhetorically masterful text in the way that it participates in Baudrillardian exchange and resists systematic meaning. Antidosis functions as a radical challenge to convention, and this claim is further substantiated by a cluster of critical paratexts that comment on this classical piece. That Antidosis remains a prominent classical text in rhetorical studies—despite the uncertainty over its meaning—demonstrates that its rhetorical success lies precisely in its ambivalence; that is, in its participation in an exchange.\n\nEnabling Exchange: The Two Halves of Antidosis\n\nTo understand how Antidosis successfully initiates exchange, critics must return to a series of passages which occur just after the text’s midpoint. These passages, which encompass sections 172 through 179, mark a division between what can be considered\nAntidosis’s two halves. Within sections 172 through 179, Isocrates transitions from a specific defense of reputation, which relies upon his personal recollections, to a general defense of rhetorical education, or what he describes as his best attempt “to explain what is the nature of this education, what is its power, what of the other arts it is akin to, what benefit it is to its devotees, and what claims [he] can make for it” (§178). Here, Isocrates signals that his text will begin to address its topic more broadly. In this text’s second half, Isocrates outlines his vision of a rhetorical education that retains civic value. However, just before he embarks on the full explanation of his educational program, Isocrates issues a warning that resembles the warning he provides in the opening lines of Antidosis.³⁰ He writes: “But I beg of you, if I appear to carry on the discussion in a manner far removed from that which is customary here, not to be impatient but to bear with me, remembering that when a man is defending himself on a charge unlike any other, he must resort to a kind of pleading which is out of the ordinary” (§179). Once again, he warns his audience that his text might seem a bit inappropriate, for it will break with customary, conventional discourse by discussing the aforementioned topics at length.\n\nThis repeated warning functions as Antidosis’s second introduction and it permits a consideration of Antidosis’s two halves. This reintroduction suggests that, by this point in the text, Isocrates has pried open a rhetorical space in which rhetorical education can undergo a critical questioning not otherwise possible; indeed, that the idea of a rhetorical education is free to circulate without being bound by an isolated logic, tied to a single value, or hindered by one dominant meaning-making system. The liberties that Isocrates\n\n---\n³⁰Too’s commentary on section 179 claims that “Isocrates draws attention to the fact that his defence is idiosyncratic and extraordinary, as he did in the first sentence of the oration” (A Commentary 182).\ntakes with his audience—for example, he is bold enough to ask for their patience ($§179$)—indicate further that the second half of this text functions differently than the first, that the rhetor enjoys a special license in what has become a more ambivalent rhetorical space. The second half of Antidosis contemplates rhetorical education so thoroughly because the text has successfully established “a blind zone” in Baudrillardian terms (Passwords 15). By line 179, Isocrates succeeds in initiating exchange.\n\nIn this series of passages, Isocrates conspicuously acknowledges the presence of a meaning-making system. From a Baudrillardian perspective, acknowledging that a sign system produces meaning constitutes a necessary step towards challenging that same system. The presence of a sign system, as Baudrillard reminds us, establishes the value of the sign, and it is this sign value that exchange ruptures (For a Critique 150). Identifying a meaning-making or signification system must therefore occur prior to the rupture of that meaning-making system. This acknowledgment occurs in section 172, when Isocrates writes:\n\n> For Athens is so large and the multitude of people living here is so great, that the city does not present to the mind an image easily grasped or sharply defined, but, like a turbid flood, whatever it catches up in its course, whether men or things, in each case sweeps them along pell-mell, and in some cases it imbues them with a reputation that is opposite of the true. ($§172$)\\(^{31}\\)\n\n---\n\n\\(^{31}\\) Too’s recent translation of section 172 reads: “Because of its size and the number of inhabitants, it is not readily understood as a whole or in detail, but like a swollen river, it carries along whoever or whatever it picks up, and it gives to some people a reputation that is completely inappropriate” (A Commentary 61). Too’s translation not only supports my interpretation, but its commentary further clarifies the reference to images not “easily grasped or sharply defined” in Norlin’s translation. As Too explains, “the quantity of images and experiences at Athens means that people become confused about some of them and give them false reputation” (A Commentary 179).\nIn this description, meaning-making in Athens is larger than any one person, any one argument, or any one representation. It is a powerful system which Isocrates compares to a flood. This system subsumes diffuse images and, after amassing them, it does with these representations what it will. As Isocrates rightly emphasizes, the system is so powerful that sometimes it “imbues” an individual or a thing “with a reputation that is opposite of the true” (§172). Thus, the system affixes a particular representation—regardless of its truth value or any other criteria by which it may be judged—to an individual or a thing. The system, in other words, pushes towards absolute meaning.\n\nParticipating in the production of meaning drives the system, and Isocrates’s words suggest that arguing against particular representations is, in the end, futile. Although these comments position Isocrates’s stated purpose of rectifying misperceptions of him and his profession as disingenuous, a Baudrillardian perspective sees potential in the futility of representation. If critics approach this text from an Aristotelian perspective or a Burkean perspective, then they might speculate about Isocrates’s purpose, intentions, or motivations behind section 172. These critics might dispute Isocrates’s representation of the meaning-making system, his representation of himself, or even his representation of Athens in this passage. However, from a Baudrillardian perspective, the description of the meaning-making system as a flood acknowledges the arbitrariness of meaning and simultaneously recognizes that this arbitrariness might potentially be pushed to extremes and ruptured. The system’s unrelenting, flood-like capacity to sweep away meanings that are “in its course” further suggests that a formidable challenge to the system would be one that would reverse the flood’s course (§172). The challenge to the system is a disturbance to its course, a rupture of the meanings it affixes to individuals and to things.\nBefore engaging in exchange in its second half, *Antidosis* must, in its first half, rupture the representational arguments forwarded by the meaning-making system. In its first half, the text challenges meaning as it has been established with respect to a teacher’s interaction with rhetorical pedagogy as well as a citizen’s involvement with the liturgy system. Athenian citizens believed that reputable teachers did not accept fees for rhetorical instruction. Pedagogues who charged students fees were perceived as indifferent to their students’ uses of rhetoric. They were stigmatized, labeled sophists, and considered to be sly in their personal use of rhetoric, especially with regard to court oratory. Ultimately, as James Fredal explains, “taking fees meant taking ‘advantage’” (155). In addition, the citizenry believed that reputable citizens should fund public projects with their personal wealth. Completed liturgies thus became a sign of civil service. As Paul Millet explains, forensic orators often invoked completed liturgies as a sign of their civil service when they defended themselves against charges of bribery and charges of murder, as well as when they desired honorifics and protections (230-3).\n\nBoth the stigma of sophism and the sign of civil service made meaning in similar ways.32 Both involved an economic exchange in which a relationship corresponds to a monetary amount. These exchanges are partially explained by the growth of the Athenian economic system during Isocrates’s lifetime, growth that gradually transformed customary relationships into economic relationships.33 However, both meanings imposed\n\n---\n\n32 As Baudrillard notes, there are many ways to make meaning. In *For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign*, Baudrillard describes three meaning-making processes: (1) *Utility*, (2) *Equivalence*, and (3) *Difference*. Each of these processes combines a particular logic with a particular value (123).\n\n33 Seaford argues: “Although the Greek economy was the first in history to be pervaded by coinage (in the advanced city states from the fifth century BC), in the classical period at least to some extent it remained *embedded* (as in other pre-modern societies) in non-economic social relations and practices: the increasing importance of commercial exchange neither produced a system of *economic* institutions nor pervaded and transformed social relations to the extent characteristic of advanced capitalism” (“Introduction” 6). The point remains that this transformation was only partial.\nthemselves upon individuals, like the flood Isocrates references in section 172. These meanings were, as Isocrates recognizes, “malicious” in their conspiracy (§16). With respect to his pedagogy, Isocrates realizes that, should he defend himself against the stigma of sophism, he will reinforce the stigma by appearing to be a sly rhetor. If he does not defend himself against the charges, then he will be condemned on account of an ineffective argument. As Isocrates acknowledges, the meaning determined by the system will stick to him in either case regardless of the truth. Likewise, the liturgy system forced the Athenian citizen to lose capital in a way that stuck. Either a citizen could forfeit economic capital and accrue symbolic capital by completing the liturgy, or that citizen could keep economic capital and forfeit reputation by invoking the antidosis procedure.\n\nInitiating Exchange: The Language of Credit in Antidosis\n\nConsidering the way in which stubborn, nonnegotiable meanings affixed themselves to individuals makes the rupture of those meanings a formidable rhetorical task. Even Isocrates, the “foremost speech artist” of the time, admits that it “was by no means an easy undertaking” (Too, A Commentary 15n35; §11). Thus, when critics approach Antidosis through a Baudrillardian framework, they raise the text’s rhetorical stakes.\n\nAs an initial and obvious move towards initiating exchange and challenging the meaning-making drive of the Athenian signification system, the text invokes the antidosis procedure as its fictional frame. In ancient Athens, the antidosis procedure was an offensive rhetorical action, or what Millet refers to as a “drastic” process that marked the “peak for potential disruption” of the liturgy system (251). In the end, however, since a\njury determined which citizen would complete the liturgy, the antidosis procedure worked in service of the Athenian meaning-making system and the values that it instantiated. Contrary to its title, the procedure did not initiate exchange, at least not in the Baudrillardian sense. In fact, some scholars doubt that any exchange ever took place during this procedure.34 From a Baudrillardian critical perspective, the actual antidosis procedure does not propel the system into an ambivalent state. Rather, the antidosis procedure merely traded in values; it did not rupture them.\n\nWithin the Baudrillardian frame, critics come to understand that if the text is to move beyond a representational argument then it will need to do much more than simply invoke the antidosis procedure as exchange. In other words, if Antidosis is to initiate exchange and challenge the meaning-making system, then it must be a rhetorically masterful text. It is, as Baudrillard reminds us, much easier to make meaning than to challenge the drive to make meaning.35 In order to challenge the drive to make meaning, Antidosis must address the dominant meanings between teacher and pedagogy and those between citizen and liturgy, as the text simultaneously works to offend the value of those meanings.\n\nFor a text like Antidosis to rupture values, it must rearrange the meanings produced by the meaning-making system. In Antidosis, Isocrates begins to initiate exchange by deploying a language of credit that emphasizes the conditional nature of meaning. His language plays upon the word credit as it is conceived of in terms of\n\n---\n\n34 Christ recognizes that “many scholars have doubted that the antidosis procedure ever entailed an exchange of property” (161). However, both Christ and Gabrielsen acknowledge that “speakers regularly treat exchange as a real possibility” (Christ 161).\n\n35 For instance, in Impossible Exchange, Baudrillard refers to the “tyranny of meaning” (134).\nvalue—as belief, as sign, and as use. Through this verbal play, Isocrates draws his audience’s attention to the fact that multiple logics surround various meanings of credit. Credit, Isocrates emphasizes, is determined on the condition of use, not by any predetermined meaning. At the beginning of his discourse, Isocrates begs his audience “to neither credit nor to discredit what has been said [against him],” until the audience has heard what he has to say (§17). Here, Isocrates entreats his audience to suspend judgment. His request anticipates the creation of an ambivalent rhetorical space in which values and value judgments are ruptured. Later, he pleads with the jury “not to credit charges which have been made without proof or trial” but rather to judge him on the basis of the arguments presented at his trial (§32). Addressing his audience directly, he tells them: “if you decide the case on this basis, you will have the credit of judging honourably” (§32). Credit, in this passage, develops a meaning that is associated with the way in which an individual arrives at a belief and formulates a judgment. The usage here reveals that the concept of credit does not refer to a static relationship between value and logic. Credit proves to be an extremely pliable concept, and Isocrates seizes upon this pliability. Admonishing his audience for any prejudice directed towards his rhetorical talents, Isocrates uses the word “credit” to emphasize that rhetorical talent should be judged only in accordance with its use. He states:\n\n[I]t would be much more just to give me credit for being an honest man than to punish me; for when a man has superior talents whether for speech or for action, one cannot fairly charge it to anything but fortune, but when a man makes good\n\n---\n\n36 Too’s commentary offers some corroboration, noting that Isocrates “makes explicit the idea that [logos] may mean both ‘speech’ and ‘account’ or ‘calculation’” (A Commentary 163).\nand temperate *use* of the power which nature has given him, as in my case, all the world ought in justice to commend his character. (§36, my emphasis)\\(^{37}\\)\n\nArguing that credit should be allotted and discredit assigned in accordance with a rhetor’s use of rhetoric, Isocrates outlines his challenge to the Athenian signification system.\n\nWith his challenge to the system outlined, Isocrates makes two broad moves in *Antidosis* that, in Baudrillardian terms, can be interpreted as deploying an exchange logic. Both of these moves reorder the relationships among teachers, pedagogies, citizens, and liturgies. Furthermore, both of these moves suggest that use ought to be the condition that determines rhetoric’s meaning. In the first move, he revisits his own writings, calling upon three excerpts to be read aloud by the clerk and interpreting these excerpts for his audience (§57-80). These excerpts demonstrate that he is a teacher of rhetoric who remains a conscientious citizen, as he uses rhetoric to address “questions of public welfare in a spirit worthy both of Athens and of Hellas” (§80).\\(^ {38}\\) In the second move, Isocrates calls upon nine of his former students as his witnesses, detailing their own uses of rhetoric as a credit to Athens (§93-140).\\(^ {39}\\) He invites his audience to suspect whatever they would like to about the nature of his relationship to his former students. These two moves allow Isocrates to reshuffle the relationships conventionally associated with meaning, reordering the established meaning with respect to a teacher’s interaction with rhetorical pedagogy as well as a citizen’s involvement with the liturgy system. Instead of meaning being established between teachers and pedagogy and between citizens and\n\n---\n\n\\(^{37}\\) Too translates the latter half of section 36 as: “One might plausibly credit good fortune when someone is better at speaking or acting than others, but everyone ought rightly to praise my character for using my natural ability well and with restraint” (*A Commentary* 40).\n\n\\(^{38}\\) Indeed, Robert Hariman identifies what he describes as an “Isocratean politics,” in which “the Isocratean education would be directed to developing citizens capable of acting together to solve problems in a manner that would allow for mutually sustainable ecological, cultural, and political practices” (228).\n\n\\(^{39}\\) As Too observes, “[t]he language which Isocrates employs to describe the teacher-student relationship in the speech is implicitly that of liturgy” (*A Commentary* 6-7).\nliturgies, Isocrates positions the teacher as the citizen and pedagogy as liturgy. As such, Isocrates exchanges meanings by logically transposing relationships, and thereby challenging convention.\n\nBy unequivocally endorsing rhetoric’s use as the criterion upon which it should be judged, *Antidosis* ostensibly undercuts the stigma of the sophist while simultaneously reworking the sign of a good citizen. In the text, Isocrates suggests that his case should be judged on the use and function of rhetoric, not upon a preconceived notion about rhetoric. From a Baudrillardian perspective, Isocrates’s argument can be interpreted as a simultaneous endorsement of *utility* (in which value occurs in conjunction with the use of rhetoric) as well as *equivalence* (in which value equals a monetary sum). This simultaneous endorsement undercuts the stigma of sophism, since the Athenian meaning-making system positioned *utility* and *equivalence* as mutually exclusive concepts. The system determined that accepting fees for rhetorical instruction meant that a teacher necessarily disregarded the use to which he and his students put rhetoric. Isocrates challenges this logic by conceding that he accepts fees from his students and also by insisting that he and his students use rhetoric well. He draws a distinction between the sophists, none of whom “has ever been thought worthy to have pupils,” and himself, who has had an abundance of students (§41). Isocrates argues that the system is broken, that use and function should impact the assignment of credit when it comes to determining who among teachers is a good citizen. Moreover, Isocrates connects the good use of a rhetorical education to civil service. Just as liturgies economically support the well-being of the *polis*, good rhetorical education also functions to support Athens. Pedagogy as well\n\n---\n\nas liturgy should signify civil service. *Antidosis* thus forwards an exchange logic, in which offering students a good rhetorical education is equivalent to paying civic liturgies to the *polis*.\n\nRadicalizing Exchange: The Extreme Exchange Logic in *Antidosis*\n\nOn account of his strong endorsement of use and function, it seems as if Isocrates’s reordering of relationships manages to undercut the stigma of the sophist (by positioning the teacher as the citizen) and garner the sign of civil service (by positioning pedagogy as liturgy). But Isocrates does not simply reorder the relationships among teachers, citizens, pedagogies, and liturgies. In a radical move, Isocrates pushes exchange logic to its extreme. If reordering relationships and introducing exchange logic is a metaphorical rip in the fabric of the system, then pushing that logic to its extreme is the rupture of the system that catapults the system into ambivalence. *Antidosis’s* readers might have expected that, after he introduces the teacher as the citizen (calling upon the clerk to read his writings) and after he introduces pedagogy as liturgy (calling upon his students as witnesses of his service to the *polis*), he would rest comfortably with the evidence he supplies to his jury. In other words, readers might grant that the basis upon which Isocrates would like his jurors to decide his case is sufficiently clear. However, Isocrates extolls his jury to hold him to “a more difficult standard than for other people” (§51). Before the clerk reads his writing, Isocrates issues a proposition that even he admits might “seem over-rash”: “I ask you not only to show me no mercy, if the oratory which I cultivate is harmful, but to inflict on me the extreme penalty if it is not superior to any other” (§51). This standard, superiority, is an extreme one. Isocrates suggests that\nIf the teacher be seen as a citizen, then the teacher must be a superior citizen and that his rhetoric must be of superior quality.\n\nThese extreme standards occur a second time, as Isocrates presents his students as his witnesses. Within the larger move of presenting pedagogy as liturgy, Isocrates addresses his audience and asks:\n\nIf any of those who have been associated with me have turned out to be good men in their relations to the state, to their friends, and to their own households—I ask you to give them the praise and not to be grateful to me on their account; but if, on the other hand, any of them have turned out to be bad—the kind of men who lay information, hale people into court, and covet the property of others—then to let the penalty be visited on me. What proposition could be less invidious or more fair than one which claims no credit for those who are honourable, but offers to submit to punishment for any who have become depraved? (§99-100)\n\nThe most striking aspect of this passage is the way in which Isocrates invokes the language of credit in order to radically challenge the system. In effect, he revokes the system’s symbolic credit, for he does not want to be praised on account of his students’ stature. Moreover, he invites discredit, asking that his students’ worst behavior be attributed to him. These are extreme moves that defy convention and challenge the system’s meaning. Isocrates has pushed representation and reputation to its logical limit. He now invites poor repute to be visited on him and commendable character to be stripped away from him.\n\nA third time—in that crucial series of passages spanning sections 172 through 179—Isocrates issues another extreme proposition. This time, he wagers his own death,\nstating: “I would rather lay down my life this day [...] after having spoken adequately upon this theme and persuaded you to look upon the study of eloquence in its true light, than to live many times my allotted span and see it to continue to fare among you as it does now” (§177). The extreme challenge of value and logic that he has undertaken during the first half of Antidosis leads Isocrates to question the value of his own life. Rhetorical education, Isocrates tells his jury, is so valuable that he would trade his life for it. The text has brought its readers to the point of rupture. While Neo-Aristotelian approaches to Antidosis might read this line as an appeal to pathos, in Baudrillardian terms it marks the ultimate challenge to the meaning-making system. According to Baudrillard, western convention holds life to be supremely valuable and it is life and survival that power the meaning-making system (Symbolic Exchange 129-30). Thus, by this point, Antidosis seems to completely abandon a representational argument and its purpose seems much larger than rectifying perceptions of Isocrates’s reputation; he is willing to die in ill-repute, in order to challenge the meaning affixed to rhetorical education. Through his text—its extreme standards of judgment and its reordered relationships between teachers, citizens, pedagogies, liturgies, life, and death—Isocrates has placed his audience in what Baudrillard refers to as “a blind zone, in which everything is called into question again” (Passwords 15).\n\nCertifying Exchange: The Genre Classification of Antidosis\n\n41 Besides Symbolic Exchange and Death, see Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies. As Mike Gane succinctly explains, death is a wager that, for Baudrillard, falls into the realm of ambivalent symbolic exchanges. Gane writes: “Symbolic exchange is a broadening out of the terrain of obligatory exchanges of the same kind: from simple exchanges in conversation to sacred sacrifices, and the exchanges between the living and the dead” (The Baudrillard Dictionary 211).\nA testament to *Antidosis*’s rhetorical success in moving beyond representation, pushing at logics, challenging meaning-making, and initiating exchange can be found in a cluster of recent criticism on this classical text. Baudrillardian rhetoric not only focuses on the radical rupture and circulation of values, but also the rupture and circulation of categorical definitions, such as genre. Although recent scholarship in genre studies endorses operative definitions of genre, or definitions grounded in genre’s many complex functions in very specific situations, the notion of genre functions, more generally, as a category. Amy Devitt argues that “[c]lassifications are effects of genre but not the extent of genre” (6). A Baudrillardian rhetoric suggests, however, that genre need not be conceived of in terms of a cause and effect relationship; rather, genre could function as perpetual and ambivalent exchange. By defying generic classification and resisting these effects to this day, *Antidosis* affirms its success in creating an ambivalent rhetorical space.\n\nCriticism of *Antidosis* acknowledges Isocrates’s own references to this text’s unusual generic status. *Antidosis* is no exception to the claim that “[g]enre is an important issue for reading Isocrates’ works” (Too, *Rhetoric* 13). In the text’s opening section, Isocrates claims that *Antidosis* “is novel and different in character” (§1). He contends that it is “a discourse so unlike any other” (§1). Later, he asks his audience to “make allowance, as they listen to [*Antidosis*], for the fact that it is a mixed discourse” (§12). As Isocrates’s own words indicate, this text deliberately defied the generic categorizations of\n\n---\n\n42 Various studies of genre, including those by Charles Bazerman, JoAnne Yates, Wanda Orlikowski, and Clay Spinuzzi have focused on the activities with which genres are involved. These studies also pay close attention to the relationship between genres and the impact that genres have upon actions. Importantly, though, the criticism of *Antidosis* often identifies a genre classification in order to forward a critical argument. In these critical arguments, genre is not associated with activity. Instead, genre is associated with convention and effect. Thus, the competing classifications are indicative of a text that ruptures convention and perpetuates movement as its effect.\nancient Athens. Critics could take Isocrates at his word and recognize that, with respect to\ngenre, he succeeds in creating an ambivalent rhetorical space. However, since the fourth\ncentury BCE, critics have attempted to define this text in terms of its genre. The critical\nrationale seems to be that, if Antidosis can be categorized according to its genre, then\ncritics might be able to better determine its value and more clearly extract meaning from\nthe text. Various scholars have treated Antidosis as a dicanic text, a forensic oratory, an\nimitative apology, an educational piece, a court speech, and even an autobiographical\nwork (Too, Rhetoric 14-7).\n\nYet, the important point about Antidosis’s genre is that it defies critical\nclassification, as a fair amount of recent critical pieces seem to note. For instance, David\nMirhady and Too echo Isocrates’s own observation about genre context, explaining that\n“Antidosis is itself an atypical speech in light of fourth-century speech genres” (Isocrates\nI 203). Terry Papillon observes that in Antidosis Isocrates chooses to “include items that\nfit none of the standard oratorical genres very well” (49). David Depew and Takis\nPoulakos refer to Isocrates’s “genre-bending” as if “genre-bending” were a character trait\n(“Introduction” 18). And even Robert J. Bonner admits the unique generic position of\nAntidosis: “neither wholly forensic nor wholly epideictic” (195).\n\nFrom a Baudrillardian perspective, these critical remarks are evidence of\nsuccessful rhetoric. In Antidosis, Isocrates succeeds in creating a rhetorical space that has\nremained ambivalent for nearly 2,400 years. Too contends that each attempt “to identify\nand categorise [Isocrates’s] texts says something about him” (Rhetoric 17). But when\ncritics adopt a Baudrillardian rhetorical perspective, the failed attempts at categorizing\nAntidosis’s genre say more about Isocrates’s rhetorical prowess. Antidosis’s resistance to\ngeneric classification positions Isocrates as a perennially successful rhetor, in Baudrillardian terms, because it persists to circulate in the “blind zone.” Rather than allowing critics to pinpoint its textual effects and, therefore, categorize its genre, Antidosis maintains ambivalence and rhetorically exchanges effects with causes.\n\nTrading Truth and Convention in Textual Controversy\n\nIn this section, my analysis moves from the classical text Antidosis to the contemporary text A Million Little Pieces. Beyond illustrating the range of texts to which a Baudrillardian approach might apply, my analysis of A Million Little Pieces reveals a text that, along with its paratexts and author, pleads a case using remarkably different strategies than those used in Antidosis. Although the juxtaposition here might seem strange because of my selection of texts, I wanted to again emphasize the close relationship of the two rhetorical phenomena that surrounded these texts: Both phenomena involved a public putting a rhetor on trial for challenging established values.\n\nOn February 1, 2006, James Frey, author of the book A Million Little Pieces, issued a note to his readers. Written in January of 2006, the note responds to allegations that Frey’s memoir—a recollection of Frey’s experiences as an alcoholic, addict, and criminal; a text selected by Oprah Winfrey as her book club’s October 2005 featured text—contains factual inaccuracies. In this note, Frey acknowledges that he “embellished many details about [his] past experiences” (“Note”). But Frey also maintains that his book should be classified as a memoir, since a “memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from a strict journalistic or historical standard” (“A Note”). That same day, Frey’s publisher, Doubleday Publishing, reaffirmed its original classification of the\nbook *A Million Little Pieces* as a work of nonfiction (“Brooklyn”). On February 2, 2006, the Brooklyn Public Library announced its own reclassification of Frey’s book. The library had previously shelved the 2003 text under the Dewey decimal number 362.29, cataloguing the book as a nonfiction piece that addresses issues of drug use and abuse. By early 2006, however, the Brooklyn Public Library had moved the text to its fiction section. As library chief of staff Dionne Mack-Harvin explained, the reclassification was necessary to “assure Brooklyn’s library users that the information they want and need is easily available and accessible within a clear and truthful classification system” (Hogan). Mack-Harvin’s comments further emphasize the relationship between the library and its community, claiming “that the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) classifies books in its collection in a way that reflects the community’s expectations” (Hogan). There was, at the time, speculation that other libraries would follow the Brooklyn Public Library’s lead.\n\nFrey’s note, Doubleday’s press release, and Mack-Harvin’s comments all address questions surrounding a given text’s genre classification. As auxiliary texts, these paratexts suggest that the genre classification of *A Million Little Pieces* disposes Frey’s book to an extreme questioning indicative of a rhetorical “blind zone.” Indeed, the book itself remains mired in ambiguity. Very little critical consensus exists as to the classification of *A Million Little Pieces*. Writers, publishers, librarians, and readers all dispute the degree to which Frey’s text instantiates or challenges convention. They ask: To what degree do the conventions of a memoir require an author to adhere to truth and fact? Does Frey’s text adhere to the conventions of a memoir? Should writing, regardless of its genre classification, ring true to a reader? Does Frey’s text, regardless of its genre classification, ring true to its readers? As the difference in the scope of these four\nquestions indicates, the controversy surrounding Frey’s text has not been easily settled. As an unsettling text that disrupts convention, *A Million Little Pieces* appears to exemplify a Baudrillardian rhetoric; it appears to be a text that creates an ambivalent rhetorical space, in which exchange occurs.\n\nHowever, a careful analysis reveals the opposite to be the case: Frey’s text along with all its paratexts—news reports, internet postings, press releases, legal documents, and two nationally televised interviews—wholeheartedly endorse conventional rhetoric, in which a text establishes a meaning-making contract with its reader. In other words, *A Million Little Pieces* is unsuccessful in sustaining Baudrillardian exchange. I argue that, contrary to the fragmentation evoked by its title, the text and its paratexts are remarkably unified in their conventional message. From a Baudrillardian rhetorical perspective, Frey’s text and its paratexts use truth to reinforce convention, and therefore squander opportunities to radically challenge the values attached to writing.\n\nTwo Rhetorical Relationships\n\nTo understand the way in which *A Million Little Pieces* and its myriad of paratexts capitulate to convention, critics must first distinguish between two relationships through which meaning is made and challenged. The first relationship makes and\n\n---\n\n43 An analysis of this controversy using Hermagoras’s stasis theory seems to substantiate this point. The controversy over *A Million Little Pieces* mushroomed so quickly that individuals immediately began arguing at cross-purposes. Some argued at the level of fact (Do truth and fact exist in memoir?), others at the level of definition (Can Frey’s text be called a memoir?), still others at the level of judgment (Is it good or bad that Frey embellished details?), and finally some at the level of policy (How should writers and publishers work to avoid similar situations in the future?).\n\n44 It is important to note that the controversy surrounding *A Million Little Pieces* proves a controversy familiar to scholars in critical autobiography studies. The same discussions that took place in during the Frey controversy also took place in the 1990s, during the *I, Rigoberta Menchú* controversy. For a comprehensive overview of this controversy, see *The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy*, edited by Arturo Arias.\nchallenges meaning through a process of textually mediated negotiation between a writer of a text and a reader of a text. This first relationship is the most conventional relationship and its basic premise—that the transit of a message occurs external to that message—undergirds the vast majority of rhetorical theories. In this first relationship, the concept of audience (whether a group or an individual, a reader or a listener, an intended audience member or an unintended audience member) assumes a central role in any communicative process. Embedded in this conventional rhetorical relationship are the rhetorical concepts of intention, implication, persona, reputation, and appeal. The second relationship makes and challenges meaning through appearance and disappearance. This second relationship is a Baudrillardian relationship in that it emphasizes the two-sided game that is internal to writing, internal to a given text. In this relationship, the whole slew of message receivers (audiences, readers, and listeners) are rendered insignificant, as are the batch of rhetorical terms that focus on the mediation of meaning between writer and reader through a text. By challenging the basic communicative premise of audience, this second relationship remains highly unconventional.\n\nDistinguishing between the conventional rhetorical relationship and the Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship offers rhetorical critics a way to reconsider *A Million Little Pieces* and its paratexts. That is to say that the controversy involving this text and its auxiliaries is a conflict between the conventional rhetorical relationship and the Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship. The disagreements over genre classification, truth, and art are, on a fundamental level, discussions as whether or not meaning should be made and challenged in a conventional manner—a manner external to a text—or in a radical manner—a manner internal to a text. Both the conventional rhetorical relationship\nand the Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship receive sustained treatment in Frey’s text. Indeed, *A Million Little Pieces* positions the character James Frey as an audience member who makes meaning and challenges meaning on account of truth, as well as a rhetor who understands that the two-sided game of composing can make and challenge meaning independent of an audience.\n\n*A Million Little Pieces* endorses the conventional rhetorical relationship, in which meaning is made and challenged externally through the involvement of an audience, by having the character James Frey use truth to evaluate a variety of texts that he encounters either as a listener or as a reader. For example, as part of his routine at a residential drug and alcohol treatment facility, Frey attends a daily lecture. One day, a former patient at the facility, who is also a “famous Rock Star,” returns to deliver the lecture (159). As Frey listens to the lecture, he begins an internal monologue berating the speaker for glorifying addiction. He refers to the speaker as a “Fraud” and a “Chump,” before he criticizes the speaker’s attempt at masking the truth that “An Addict is an Addict” (159). Frey explains:\n\n> To make of light of [this truth], brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth. That this man is standing in front of me and everyone else in this room lying to us is heresy. The truth is all that matters. This is fucking heresy. (159)\n\nThis passage demonstrates the way in which a listener possesses an ability to make and challenge the meaning of a given text within the conventional rhetorical relationship. Frey’s character rejects the speaker’s message because the message does not correspond to the truth as the listener conceives of it. In the conventional rhetorical relationship, the\n\n---\n\n45 All in-text citations of *A Million Little Pieces* have been taken from the 2003 Doubleday edition.\ntruth of the message is less important than the listener’s perception of that truth. Truth is neither resolutely singular, nor necessarily objective. As Frey explains, “[r]idiculous things can be true,” and truth often runs deep (223; 368). Thus, the conventional rhetorical relationship privileges the listener’s version of the truth as the criterion with which texts can be accepted or rejected.\n\nThe conventional rhetorical relationship is repeatedly presented through Frey’s character as he is exposed to a variety of other texts. As he listens to another character named Leonard, Frey states that he can believe in Leonard’s words because “[t]hey are true” (174). The marshaling of truth to substantiate an audience member’s evaluation of a text is also presented in terms of reading written texts. Frey dismisses the Bible, because “[i]t didn’t ring true” (198). However, Frey’s sense of truth makes the *Tao te Ching* consistently amenable to him. Frey champions the series of eighty-one short poems that comprise the *Tao’s* text as “ring[ing] true and that is all that matters the truth” (161).\n\nMeditating on the *Tao*, he gushes:\n\n> The words are as true now as the first time I read them. They don’t tell me what to do or how to live or what not to do or how not to live, they simply tell me to be what I am and who I am and let life exist and exist within life. The words are true.\n\n(368)\n\n*A Million Little Pieces* thus positions truth as the main criterion through which a text should be judged by a reader. In the conventional rhetorical relationship, a reader makes or challenges a text’s meaning according to its resonance with truth. The conventional rhetorical relationship depends, therefore, on readers’ external validations of a text’s truth.\nFrey’s text does not only endorse the conventional rhetorical relationship. It also presents the Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship by focusing on the tension internal to composition and independent of audience. The Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship positions appearance and disappearance as the two sides of the composing game, with the former working to produce meaning and the latter attempting to challenge meaning. To emphasize this second relationship, *A Million Little Pieces* positions Frey’s character as a self-reflective rhetor, a speaker or a writer who considers the way in which meaning is made and challenged by the very composition of a text. For example, Frey muses over the composition of his own obituary. He considers the way in which “[t]he truth of [his] existence will be removed and replaced with imagined good,” as well as how “[t]he reality of how [he] lived will be avoided and changed and phrases will be dropped in like Beloved Son, Loving Brother, Reliable Friend, Hardworking Student” (85). Here, the composition negotiates its own internal truth and its own internal meaning. No audience need externally evaluate this obituary. A radical relationship involving imagination, removal, change, and challenge replaces the conventional relationship between text and reader, and its criterion of truth. The composition that adheres to a Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship escapes meaning and questions binaries like fact and fiction, true and false. In this second rhetorical relationship, imagination allows rhetoric to move beyond strict representation. When Frey’s character imagines an obituary, he contemplates and articulates the Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship by considering the capacity of a composition to resist predetermined values and to exceed logical options.\n\nThe strongest example of how *A Million Little Pieces* deploys a Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship in order to dissolve established logics and create an ambivalent\nrhetorical space occurs in a scene towards the beginning of Frey’s book. In this scene, Frey’s character attempts to complete the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory psychiatric test. He is instructed to complete the test, taking as much time as he needs to respond to 567 statements with either “true” or “false.” Frey reads and responds to a variety of statements, stopping at the statement: “My sins are unpardonable” (40). Frey reads, but does not respond to, this question. This scene demonstrates the way in which imagination can challenge convention. Indeed, Frey imagines a third kind of response, one that escapes the criterion of truth and remains mired in ambiguity. That he refuses to respond or evaluate this small chunk of text substantiates the two-sided game internal to writing. The scene questions the assumption that a text relies upon a reader to make and challenge meaning. In this case, the making of meaning or the challenging of meaning frustrates the reader. The reader is unable to judge the statement, and, consequently, the psychologist, whose job it is to analyze the test results, will also be unable to evaluate this statement. Instead, the statement is internally ambiguous; it sustains an ambivalent exchange which defies any permanent evaluation. In this unconventional rhetorical relationship, the choices of “true” or “false” are ruptured. Any permanent evaluation remains impossible.\n\nTruth and Trust, Memoir Writers and Memoir Readers\n\nThe distinction between the two kinds of rhetorical relationships—the conventional, externalized relationship that requires an audience and the radical, internalized relationship as posited by Baudrillard—encourages a critical reconsideration of the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces. Given its treatment of both kinds\nof rhetorical relationships, *A Million Little Pieces* possesses a rhetorical malleability that could have been mobilized during the controversy in order to move beyond a conception that memoir is dictated by truthful representation. The various rhetors involved in this controversy could have invoked the Baudrillardian rhetorical relationship in order to imagine unconventional possibilities and more nuanced positions regarding Frey’s text. However, Frey’s text and its paratexts capitulated to the conventional value system, squandering an opportunity to create an ambivalent rhetorical space in which established values, logics, and conventions are questioned. Put differently, the controversy involving *A Million Little Pieces* proved remarkably unsuccessful from a Baudrillardian perspective. Rather than establishing a “blind zone” within which everything would be interrogated, the controversy sought to deliberately illuminate the fact from the fiction, heralding truth and vilifying lies.\n\nAlthough questions regarding the factual accuracy of Frey’s text had been raised since the text’s publication in 2003, the controversy over *A Million Little Pieces* erupted on January 8th, 2006, when the website *The Smoking Gun (TSG)* published an exposé entitled “A Million Little Lies.” *TSG*’s self-stated purpose is not to create controversy over texts. Instead, the website supplies visitors with “exclusive documents—cool, confidential, quirky—that can’t be found elsewhere on the Web” (“About The Smoking”). In an attempt to find one of Frey’s mug shots from one of the multiple arrests detailed in *A Million Little Pieces*, *TSG* discovered that many of the incidents recounted by Frey were “wholly fabricated or wildly embellished” (“A Million”). Instead of publishing one of Frey’s two mug shots that they *did* find, *TSG* published the results of a six-week fact-finding mission in which they cross-checked details from *A Million Little\n\n46 See Maslin and Rybak.\nPieces with public documents and other interviews. The exposé by TSG led to an array of other texts—news reports, internet postings, press releases, legal documents, and two nationally televised interviews of Frey—the majority of which expressed disgust at Frey’s lies.\n\nThat the results shocked so many individuals and escalated to such a degree should be understood as a symptom of the conventional rhetorical relationship, in which meaning is negotiated between the writer and the reader through the text. Many of the auxiliary texts created during this controversy refer to this rhetorical relationship in contractual terms. For instance, in her comments on the Frey controversy, Susan Cheever observes:\n\nThe basis of most good writing is the connection between the writer and the reader—this begins with the contract with the reader, which is made by the writer in the opening words and paragraphs of each work. The promise the writer makes—implicitly or explicitly—defines what will come afterward. (Johnson)\n\nCheever’s statement is striking for the way in which the reader-writer contract precedes just about everything else. From the reader’s perspective, Cheever’s comments seem conventional, for a writer’s early stance towards a reader impacts the reader’s reception of the text. When considered from the writer’s perspective, however, the Cheever’s assertion implies that good writers draft a contract with their readers early-on in their text. Cheever’s observations are echoed by Samuel G. Freedman’s description of the writer-reader relationship as a compact. As Freedman explains, “[f]iction and nonfiction make fundamentally different compacts with a reader and are held to fundamentally different standards” (53). Freedman merely suggests what other critics more directly\nassert: Memoirists maintain more solemn compacts with their readers. Maureen Corrigan, for one, defines the difference between fiction and nonfiction solely in terms of the “handshake” exchanged between the writer and the reader. Likewise, William Zinsser contends:\n\nAs a memoir writer, I have a contract with my readers to arrive at the truth about my life to the best of my ability to recall it. The readers buy into that contract and expect that from me. If the writer begins to invent, the writer loses credibility.\n\n(Johnson)\n\nFor critics and writers like Cheever, Freedman, Corrigan, and Zinsser, no relationship other than the presumed relationship between the reader and the writer would facilitate the writing of a memoir. A strong notion of intent seems coextensive with this position. According to these individuals, the presumed writer-reader relationship binds and constrains the writing of a text, as the expectations of and standards for that text follow from the relationship between writer and reader. In the case of the memoir, the relationship between the writer and the reader is one in which the reader trusts that the writer is representing the truth.\n\nIn these paratexts, the Baudrillardian alternative to the reader-writer relationship receives little consideration. Freedman, for instance, snipes that “[w]riters do not write only for themselves” (53). Yet, Freedman’s assertion stands in stark contrast to Baudrillard’s declaration: “I just write for myself” (Baudrillard Live 182). In their unfaltering support of the writer-reader agreement, these paratexts do not invite alternative perspectives into the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces. The Baudrillardian perspective suggests that writing does not follow from the writer-reader\ncontract. Baudrillardian rhetoric consistently questions cause-and-effect relationships, including the cause-and-effect relationship articulated by critics and writers like Cheever, Freedman, Corrigan, and Zinsser. Baudrillardian rhetoric would challenge the general idea that writing follows a contract, in particular that the solidification of the writer-reader contract functions as a cause that leads to the effect of writing. In the auxiliary texts generated by the controversy over *A Million Little Pieces*, this kind of Baudrillardian rhetoric occurs, ironically, in Frey’s note to his readers. Frey concedes: “I didn’t initially think of what I was writing as nonfiction or fiction, memoir or autobiography” (“Note”). Thus, it is in Frey’s attempt to reestablish a relationship with readers that he acknowledges the possibility that a writer may write without first establishing an agreement with readers. Frey’s statement questions the notion that writing necessarily follows from a writer-reader contract. Unfortunately, Frey’s note quickly undercuts this suggestion by listing reader-based reasons for his purpose in writing *A Million Little Pieces*.\n\nAs many of the paratexts acknowledge, the writer-reader agreement manifests itself in the genre classification of a given text and, as such, the agreement locks the writer, reader, and the text into a proscribed value system. According to these paratexts, the contract is less about what a writer will write and more about how a writer will write; that is to say, the agreement determines the value system under which the writer, reader, and text meet. Behind the conventions of a text reside the values shared by the writer and the reader. Commenting on the Frey controversy, Roy Peter Clark states:\n\n> Transparency has become an important virtue in American culture […] Some readers don’t care, of course, when memoirists fudge the facts; but most readers\nthink that memoir is nonfiction. Just ask around. A contract with the reader requires the author to assure the reader that nothing in the story was made up. So let's have truth in advertising. And let there be a foreword to every book and a long footnote to every story in which the author reveals standards and methods. I distrust authors who don't want to do this. It seems like they are hiding something from the reader. (Johnson)\n\nIn Clark’s comment, a sense of trust is conventionally established between the memoir writer and the memoir reader on account of truthful and transparent representation. Convention instructs writers and readers of memoir, alike, to value truth and fact. Clark’s statement further demonstrates the way in which conventional values steer textual conventions. Clark values truth and transparency so much that he proscribes forwards and footnotes for every memoir. Rick Moody concurs. In Moody’s estimation, “calling something a memoir implies certain literary values, and chief among these is the fealty to the truth” (Johnson). The value system described by Clark and Moody, and repeatedly invoked during the Frey controversy, unites memoir writers and memoir readers through a dedication to truth. For both writers and readers, memoir conventionally means truth.\n\nA Baudrillardian rhetoric attempts to challenge conventional meaning, and it is in this sense that the text and its paratexts were most unsuccessful from a Baudrillardian rhetorical perspective. Many of the most notable texts that were exchanged during this controversy did not attempt to disrupt the conventional values and rupture the dominant meaning-making system. Instead, they traded conventional notions of truth. For example, Frey’s own defense of his text on the January 11, 2006, Larry King Live show invokes\n\n---\n\n47 Indeed, there is evidence that these forwards and footnotes became increasingly common following the Frey controversy.\nthe very meaning-making system that has fueled the scrutiny of *A Million Little Pieces*. During the interview, Frey argues that his book conveys “the essential truth of [his] life” (Interview by Larry King). He holds that his book—which he defends as a memoir—maintains a degree of factual accuracy, as only the factual accuracy of eighteen pages out of 383 pages have been questioned. Frey’s defense subscribes to the very conventions that bother his writing; yet, from a Baudrillardian rhetorical perspective, Frey could have argued that his memoir was unconventional and that exceeded the conventional binary of either truth or lie, either fact or fiction. According to Baudrillard, writing is an *illusory* art, in which appearance and disappearance are perpetually exchanged. As an alternative to making truth appear, Frey might have argued that his writing worked to challenge appearance and the representation of truth. Frey could have invoked the way in which his character in *A Million Little Pieces* drew upon imagination to challenge meaning as an analogy for his own compositional method. However, he did not.\n\nUnlike the most prominent paratexts involved in this controversy, there were some auxiliary texts which activated a Baudrillardian rhetorical perspective by challenging the meaning-making system that valued truth and fact in conventional memoir. These less notable texts appeared in places that included internet message boards and published letters to editors of various news publications. These postings and letters show that it was the readers of *A Million Little Pieces*, not the writer of *A Million Little Pieces*, who were most disposed to discard the conventional meaning-making system. For instance, one reader wrote: “I loved *Million Little Pieces* [sic] and *Leonard*, and must admit I am not bothered about what is true and what is not in the books—they are both fantastic pieces of writing, compelling and entertaining” (Jon). Another reader\nquestions: “whether wholly true or not, is it not the writer’s art, and in fact job, to transport the reader and give us a fantastic page-turning read?” (Nissa). According to this reader, the answer is: “Yes” (Nissa). A third reader exclaims: “If fibbing made this book more appealing to the masses, and it’s likely to end up in the hands of addicts and their families, I say, ‘Fib on.’” (Martinez).\n\nOprah Winfrey’s Conventional Crusade for Truth\n\nThe pinnacle of the controversy over A Million Little Pieces occurred on January 26, 2006, when Oprah Winfrey interviewed James Frey. The Winfrey interview occurred two weeks after Larry King’s interview with Frey, and it has been described by Stephen King as a “ritual scourging.” If this interview was a scourging, then it was a scourging in the name of convention, for the Winfrey interview marks the triumph of conventional truth over Baudrillardian ambivalence.\n\nIn this interview, Winfrey mobilizes conventional rhetoric in order to erode any ground upon which Frey might offer an alternative perspective. Winfrey approaches the interview through the issue of trust. She uses trust to introduce the controversy on an interpersonal level. She begins by explaining the difficulty she has even speaking with Frey. She feels “duped,” and as if Frey “betrayed millions of readers” and “conned” everyone (Interview by Oprah Winfrey). Winfrey is one reader among many who feels as is Frey ignored his agreement with her. Thus, Winfrey occupies a metonymic position throughout the interview. She stands in for other readers, as a part of Frey’s readership that may feel angry and cheated. Since Winfrey ascribes to a highly conventional rhetorical relationship in which an audience’s trust is an essential part of rhetoric, her\ndemeanor during this interview can also be interpreted as an attempt to reconstruct her own viewer’s trust in her and her show. She, of course, was responsible for selecting Frey’s book for her book club and recommending it to a nation of viewers. She also came to Frey’s defense two weeks earlier during the King interview. Towards the end of that interview, Winfrey called into King’s show and supported Frey’s text, stating: “although some of the facts have been questioned […] the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me” (Interview by Larry King). Winfrey would explain her unconventional support of Frey’s book two weeks later, referring to her statement as a defense that resulted from clouded judgment. However, feeling as if she had been conned, Winfrey rescinds her support of Frey’s text.\n\nWinfrey’s once-clouded judgment has become clear: In her interview, truth becomes the criterion for her readerly judgments. Winfrey measures Frey’s statements according to their truth. At one point in the interview, she shares her opinion that Frey’s novel “presented a false person” (Interview by Oprah Winfrey). Later, when Frey refers to an idea with which he worked in his book, Winfrey interrupts him and exclaims: “That’s a lie. It's not an idea, James. That's a lie” (Interview by Oprah Winfrey). Winfrey’s interview is in no uncertain terms a corrective measure by which a reader might vindicate truth. Winfrey embarks on a crusade to restore the solemn pact that the memoir genre establishes between writer and reader. She even inquires as to Frey’s desire to alert his readers to the fiction found within this memoir by printing a disclaimer on his book. Although she had expressed her belief that “discussion will be furthered by the so-called controversy” during her call into Larry King Live, when conducting her own interview of Frey, Winfrey seemed annoyed by discussion and instead grilled him about\nthe facts (Interview by Larry King). She asks questions such as: “Why did you lie?” “How much of the book is fabricated?” Winfrey further questions Frey’s motives for lying and his feelings about doing so.\n\nFrey, for his part, seems defenseless during this interview. His answers to Winfrey questions seem subdued. He maintains that he wrote *A Million Little Pieces* “from memory,” but he seems to listen to Winfrey’s points throughout the interview (Interview by Oprah Winfrey). Ultimately, he sheepishly agrees with her assessment of the situation. Frey’s capitulation to the dominant meaning-making system—its valuing of truth and its belief in the writer-reader pact—is best captured in his closing exchange with Winfrey:\n\nWinfrey: I appreciate you being here because I believe the truth can set you free. I realize this has been a difficult time for you... Maybe this is the beginning of another kind of truth for you.\n\nFrey: I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, I think this is obvious. This hasn’t been a great day for me. It certainly hasn’t been a great couple weeks for me. But I think I come out of it better. I mean, I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to... to lying. (Interview by Oprah Winfrey)\n\nA Unified Response to a Fragmented Text\n\nThe epigraph to *A Million Little Pieces* forwards a scene that can be interpreted as emphasizing disrepair. The scene captures the feeling of the postmodern era—an era of sustained fragmentation, of a shattering beyond repair. The epigraph reads:\nThe Young Man came to the Old Man seeking counsel.\n\nI broke something, Old Man.\n\nHow badly is it broken?\n\nIt’s in a million little pieces.\n\nI’m afraid I can’t help you.\n\nWhy?\n\nThere’s nothing you can do.\n\nWhy?\n\nIt can’t be fixed.\n\nWhy?\n\nIt’s broken beyond repair. It’s in a million little pieces. (Frey, *A Million Epigraph*)\n\nThe epigraph’s sense of relinquishment retains a hint of nihilism and it seems wryly sarcastic in its tone. In short, the epigraph suggests that Frey’s book might be predisposed to a Baudrillardian rhetoric. Indeed, particular scenes in the text seem to endorse Baudrillardian rhetoric, as Frey’s character ruptures logic, challenges truth value, and defies convention. Nonetheless, *A Million Little Pieces* and its paratexts remain unsuccessful creating an ambivalent rhetorical space and initiating exchange within that space.\n\nIn stark contrast to the fragmentation described in the epigraph of Frey’s book, the texts involved in the controversy subscribed to an extremely cohesive meaning-making system that united memoir writer with memoir reader in a pact sealed by truth value. Rather than challenging convention, this controversy ascribed to convention. In the end, it was adjudicated in United States District Court. On May 14, 2007, a consolidated class\naction lawsuit was settled, with Doubleday’s parent company Random House Publishing and James Frey offering a refund to readers of *A Million Little Pieces* who felt misled by the text. These misled readers needed only to cut off the book’s front cover, fill-out a claim form, and place both in the mail, in order to receive their refund (In re).\n\nFrom a Baudrillardian perspective, it is only fitting that this controversy culminates in an economic exchange that requires readers to literally slice into and sacrifice Frey’s writing. Baudrillard would argue that those who willingly participated in the truth monopoly, those who attempted to ferret out the real from the imaginary and the fact from the fiction, had already butchered Frey’s writing. The arguments forwarded in search of the truth in Frey’s text effectively squelched the exchange between appearance and disappearance that Baudrillard finds so important to writing.\n\nRhetoric and the Public Good\n\nTaken together, the above analyses of *Antidosis* and *A Million Little Pieces* suggest that Baudrillardian rhetoric is a resolutely sophistic rhetoric. By conceiving of rhetorical success in terms of exchange, Baudrillardian rhetoric preserves the potential for the weaker argument to be made the stronger argument. As such, it is a rhetoric that offers recourse to rhetors, such as Isocrates or Frey, who momentarily occupy the weaker side of the argument. When successfully deployed, Baudrillardian rhetoric transforms feeble and defensive posturing into a resolute and offensive stance. Thus, Baudrillardian rhetoric possesses the ability to radically shift arguments and change judgments.\n\nAs a sophistic rhetoric, Baudrillardian rhetoric is vulnerable to the charge that it may be deployed unethically and used to replace a bad argument with a good argument.\nBehind this charge is a relatively static understanding of values, an understanding of values which foregrounded both *Antidosis* and *A Million Little Pieces*. As my analyses demonstrate, Baudrillardian rhetoric combats static understandings of value; it seeks to rupture established value systems. Accordingly, Baudrillardian rhetoric undercuts the centuries-old attack on sophistic rhetoric.\n\nBeyond warding off conventional arguments against sophistry, Baudrillardian rhetoric asks its auditors—whether members of the public or members of the academy—to radically reconsider the values upon which rhetoric is judged. For members of the general public, this means a reconsideration of what constitutes a public good. For instance, is it good for the public to share an understanding of truth? To recognize education as a public service? To adjudicate rhetoric in the courts? For members of the academy, namely rhetorical critics, this means an expanded definition of rhetorical success and a critical openness to new and different conceptions of rhetoric beyond representation.\nChapter 4:\nRhetorical Studies, the Series, the Model, and Baudrillard\n\nAs I argued in my previous chapter, rhetorical critics can deploy Baudrillardian rhetoric as a framework through which they can contemplate a text’s potential to resist meaning. My analyses of Isocrates’s *Antidosis* and James Frey’s *A Million Little Pieces* adopted a Baudrillardian perspective, in order to evaluate the degree to which each text and its auxiliary texts shattered convention, ruptured established value systems, and dissolved dominant logics. In other words, I generalized a notion of Baudrillardian rhetoric and applied this notion of rhetoric to other texts. In doing so, I aimed to demonstrate an alternative way by which rhetorical studies could conceive of a rhetoric beyond representation.\n\nThis chapter steps away from the discrete moves of generalization and application deployed in the previous chapter and, instead, offers a metacritical commentary on those very moves, as well as the moves I executed in chapter one and two. My arguments in the previous three chapters have focused upon the relationship between methods, whether critical or rhetorical, and rhetorical objects. James Jasinski notes that recent trends in rhetorical studies suggest that the relationship between *method* and *theory* deserves more critical attention than the relationship between *method* and *object*. According to Jasinski, method continues to enjoy an unmatched status in rhetorical studies; however, there is evidence suggesting the decline of method and a “shift away from method-based criticism” (“The Status” 254). Here, Jasinski conceives of method-based criticism as criticism that applies a critical method to a rhetorical text—the kind of criticism that I practiced in chapter three. Jasinski finds that the decline in method-based criticism has\nbeen accompanied by the rise in what he refers to as conceptually-oriented criticism (256). For Jasinski and other critics, the difference between method-based criticism and concept-based criticism is located in the relationship between method and theory. In method-based criticism, theory produces criticism, in that theory provides a methodological lens that enables the critical analysis of a rhetorical object. In concept-based criticism, criticism produces theory, in that criticism generates new ideas and concepts that embolden theory. Thus, method and theory share a relationship in the production of the older kind of criticism, while method is extricated from the production of criticism in this more recent kind of rhetorical criticism.\n\nThe extrication of method from conceptually oriented criticism pits method and theory in an oppositional relationship. When rhetorical critics embrace a view of method and theory as oppositional critical elements, the result eschews the productive industry that is rhetorical criticism. Jasinski, for his part, articulates the category of conceptually-oriented criticism in an attempt “to disrupt the ‘silence’ with respect to the ‘theoretical productivity’” of rhetorical criticism (266). While his attempt champions theoretical productivity, it also extinguishes any methodological productivity. Concept-based criticism opposes method to such a degree that it abandons method. But, even conceptually oriented criticism involves method and even conceptually oriented critics adhere to a rhetorical method as they write their criticism. In short, rhetorical criticism is a productive industry that necessitates both theory and method.\n\nDrawing upon Baudrillard’s discussion of the series and the model, I aim to demonstrate that theory and method maintain a relationship that enables the production of rhetorical criticism; nonetheless, the stakes are quite different in criticism that favors\ntheory than they are in criticism that favors method. Both theory and method are needed to produce criticism, but, as I will show, the characteristics of their products and by-products are rhetorically distinctive. In this chapter, I argue that existing explanations of the dynamic between method and theory as manifested in rhetorical criticism are insufficient. To better explain the method and theory dynamic that produces rhetorical criticism, I turn to Baudrillard’s work on the model and the series in *The System of Objects*. Next, I offer a metacritical commentary about the ways in which rhetorical scholars have treated Baudrillard’s writing and constructed him as a rhetorical theorist. To conclude my discussion, I turn to Baudrillard’s own critical commentary about his rhetoric, proving that Baudrillard was indeed a rhetorical theorist in the most robust sense, since he engages with both theory and method.\n\nRhetorical Criticism as Production and Consumption\n\nRhetorical criticism is a fundamentally productive endeavor in which critics construct, manufacture, build, and support arguments, analyses, interpretations, and understandings. Not surprisingly, scholars distinguish between method-based criticism and conceptually oriented criticism on the basis of their products, citing critical products and thereby opposing method-based criticism to concept-based criticism. Since critical products (i.e. interpretations or pieces of criticism) are invoked as evidence of the separation of method from theory, my argument—that rhetorical criticism depends upon the relationship between theory and method—begins by reviewing the way in which scholars have differentiated these two kinds of criticism on account of their critical products.\nMethod-based criticism produces interpretations by creating and replicating methodological approaches in a manner akin to the sciences or social sciences. The association of method-based criticism with more scientific modes of inquiry results, in part, from Edwin Black’s comparison of the critic with the scientist in the opening chapter of *Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method*. Writing in 1965, Black observes that the achievements of science have made “scientific methodology a model for thought” (2). Science, particularly its focus on method, influences modern critics, making them “especially conscious of their methods” (2). In the characterizations of method-based criticism that connect method with science, method serves only to test theory and add to the model. Method works to build the model. Jasinski, who views method-based criticism as functioning deductively, notes that “the social scientific model of theory creates explanatory models that are tested in order to produce generalizations and predictions” with method driving the production (257). Methods work to organize critical products, binding and disciplining critical products under a coherent set of rules and standards. As Stephanie Houston Grey notes, methods allow members of a particular discipline to assess the work of colleagues. If particular individuals break the rules, reject the standard, or depart from the method, then “their work will be devalued or perhaps even silenced” (Grey 358). In method-based criticism, theory serves criticism by preceding method and method maintains standards of value as it contributes to the model. Thus, critical products are circumscribed by method; they are finished when the method is completed and they are judged in accordance with the method.\n\nIn terms of Baudrillardian exchange, a method-based piece of criticism might outline three criteria of exchange, apply these criteria to a text, and test the ability of that\ntext to in accordance with the enumerated criteria. For example, the criteria of exchange might be: (1) the rupture of values; (2) the questioning of dominant logics; and, (3) the departure from conventions. These three criteria would then be applied to a text like Antidosis as a basis for evaluating that text’s capacity to initiate and sustain exchange. The resulting assessment would then contribute to this particular pattern of method-based criticism by supporting it or calling for its revision.\n\nAlthough concept-based criticism differs significantly from method-based criticism, it too comprises a productive endeavor. Conceptually oriented criticism, as Jasinski cautions, “should not be confused with the social scientific model of theory” (256). Whereas Jasinski contends that method-based criticism begins with theory and works deductively, he argues that concept-based criticism begins with criticism and works abductively. For Jasinski, the process of abduction resembles “a back and forth tacking movement between the text and the concept or concepts,” in which the critic encounters “a text or a series of texts” (256). Abduction involves the growth or evolution of criticism and it might otherwise be described as “the constant interaction of careful reading and rigorous conceptual reflection” (256). Accordingly to Jasinski, “the concepts(s) remain essentially works in progress,” while the critic’s “understanding of the concept(s) evolves through the back and forth movement between concept and object” (256). Grey’s description of conceptually oriented criticism emphasizes this point as well. For Grey, conceptually oriented criticism never produces a finished product (359). In contradistinction to method-based criticism, concept-based criticism works from the premise that “[n]o theory or model is ever complete” (359). Whereas Black compared the method-based critic to a scientist, Grey describes the conceptually oriented critic as an\nentrepreneur ready to seize upon the heuristic value of criticism detached from method (341). Conceptually oriented criticism finds value in the critical act that explores concepts in depth. This more recent kind of criticism elevates the critic and simply allocates value to the generation of theory. Ultimately, conceptually oriented critical products are unfinished; they are useful in so far as they are generative for future studies.\n\nIn terms of Baudrillardian exchange, a concept-based piece of criticism might explore a text like Antidosis in terms of what it can contribute to an understanding of exchange. Unlike its methodological counterpart, concept-based criticism would not apply any stringently predetermined criteria to a text. Rather, this kind of criticism would begin with the critic’s engagement with the text and attempt to thicken the concept of exchange by gleaning insights from Antidosis. This kind of criticism embraces interpretation to such a degree that interpretation never ends, nor is the concept ever completely understood. Instead, the concept invites further exploration through future criticism of other texts and events.\n\nAlthough the differences between these two types of criticism are manifold and the distinctions between their two kinds of critical products significant, both kinds of criticism are similar in that they are productive industries. The language with which scholars use to describe each kind of criticism—production, work, value, drive, entrepreneur—positions rhetorical criticism as industry. This view is only further supported by Jasinski’s characterization of criticism “as a force for educating its audience and helping those audience members to become better judges and/or consumers of various types of practices” (342). By this reading, criticism is a productive industry aimed at improving consumption.\nThe way in which critics discuss and describe rhetorical criticism should not, as Grey notes, be ignored. In her discussion of conceptually oriented criticism, Grey contends that rhetorical criticism “derives its meaning both from how it is done and how it is talked about” (343). Thus, to talk about rhetorical criticism in terms of production and consumption says something about “how it is done” and, in the following section, I inquire further into “how it is done.” I ask: If rhetorical criticism is talked about as a productive industry, then what does this reveal about how critics practice rhetorical criticism? Understanding rhetorical criticism as a productive industry suggests that production and consumption are intertwined and form a larger system that involves methods, theories, and objects. Heretofore, descriptions of the system of rhetorical criticism, particularly descriptions of concept-based criticism, unsatisfactorily abandon method. As I intend to show, method remains important to the system, to both method-based criticism and concept based-criticism; that is to say theory and method maintain a relationship in rhetorical criticism, no matter the kind. To support this contention and to offer a more comprehensive description of the system of rhetorical criticism, I turn to Baudrillard’s work with the model and the series.\n\nThe Ideology of Production and Consumption: The Rhetoric of the Model and the Series\n\nTo support my claim that theory and method maintain a relationship in rhetorical criticism, no matter the kind, I turn to Baudrillard’s early work The System of Objects. Unlike the majority of Baudrillard’s work, which confronts the production/making of meaning with the seduction/challenging of meaning, The System of Objects primarily concentrates upon the way in which everyday objects or products make meaning. The\nSystem of Objects exhibits the influence of Roland Barthes’s work on Baudrillard and reads much like Barthes’s The System of Fashion. For the purposes of my argument, the most significant aspect of the Barthes’s influence on The System of Objects is that the text invokes the concepts of rhetoric and ideology in a way that follows Barthes, where rhetoric is the symbolic manifestation of ideology. The book’s purpose, as Baudrillard explains it, is to grapple with the way in which products (everyday, practical, or technical objects) speak. He notes that, when compared to a language system, the system of objects is highly unstable and a “description of the system of objects cannot be divorced from a critique of that system’s practical ideology” (System 8-9). Ideology as manifested in rhetoric is therefore central to Baudrillard’s analysis of the system of objects.\n\nFor Baudrillard, the ideology of the system of objects and their consumption is composed of the dynamic between the model and the series. For Baudrillard, models are exemplary objects that are meant to be imitated. Baudrillard’s understanding of the model invokes the definition of a model “as an object to be copied,” as a “thing eminently worthy of imitation” (“Model”). The model may manifest itself as an idealized design, pattern, or description “of a particular system, situation, or process” (“Model”).\n\n---\n\n48 In an interview with Monique Arnaud and Mike Gane, Baudrillard explains that there are “others who have influenced me” and he proceeds to note that “Roland Barthes is someone to whom I felt very close, such a similarity of position that a number of things he did I might have done myself” (Baudrillard Live 204). Baudrillard’s debt to Barthes is further evident in his use of the word rhetoric in The System of Objects, for it resembles similar usages that occur in Barthes’s The Fashion System and Elements of Semiology. When Baudrillard explains “the rhetoric of this object” by way of a twofold connotation that unites product and myth under a rhetoric, Baudrillard seems to be working within a Barthesian understanding of rhetoric, one in which the rhetorical system and connotative system are coextensive. As Barthes repeatedly asserts, rhetoric and connotation occur in the same system (Fashion 36-9; Elements 92-3). “With the rhetorical system,” says Barthes, “we broach the general level of connotation” (Fashion 225). The similarities between Baudrillard’s use of rhetoric, here, and some of Barthes’s invocations of rhetoric should not be too surprising, for Baudrillard references Barthes in the introduction to The System of Objects. As Mike Gane recognizes, “Baudrillard himself made no secret of the fact that Barthes had not only furnished the method but also the problem for [Baudrillard’s] first book” (Baudrillard: Critical 35). In this instance, then, examining Baudrillard’s use of the word rhetoric connects Baudrillard’s work with Barthes’s work and further suggests that both Baudrillard and Barthes are keenly concerned with object-oriented rhetorics.\nmodel might even be “put forward as a basis for theoretical or empirical understanding,” as a high-quality axiom “for calculations [and] predictions” (“Model”). The series, however, involves a sequence of things that may include discourse, writing, or thought (“Series”). The series is “a set of objects of one kind, differing progressively in size or in some other respect, or having a recognized order of enumeration” (“Series”). In a material sense, a series is comprised of “a range or continued spatial succession of similar objects” (“Series”). According to Baudrillard, “the status of the modern object is dominated by the MODEL/SERIES distinction” and this distinction is moreover a rhetorical distinction (System 147; emphasis original). Rhetoric assumes a prominent position in the system of objects for it constitutes, in the Barthesian sense, the symbolic manifestation of ideology. Baudrillard discusses the distinction between the model and the series as a rhetorical distinction: “the serial object has its own class-specific script, its own rhetoric—just as the model has its own rhetoric of reticence, veiled functionality, perfection and eclecticism” (160). Thus, the rhetoric of the series and the rhetoric of the model—the “scripts” of each of kind of object—display the dynamic ideology that drives the system of production and consumption.\n\nThroughout his discussion of the system, Baudrillard illustrates the distinctions between the model and the series in terms of their rhetorical differences. For instance, Baudrillard explains that “the nuance (within a unity) has come to characterize the model, while difference (within uniformity) has come to characterize the series” (System 160; emphasis original). He further explains that the “model has a harmony, a unity, a homogeneity, a consistency of space, form, substance, and function; it is, in short, a syntax,” while the series “is merely juxtaposition, haphazard combination, inarticulate\ndiscourse” (159). Thus, the rhetoric of the model appreciates subtleties and provides a sense of coherence. Models maintain a status by transcending the system.49 On the contrary, the rhetoric of the series manufactures difference and feigns value through combinations. Series are marked by “inessential qualities” and “shoddiness,” and, as Gary Genosko explains, “they are found in cluttered interiors” (Genosko, “Model” 130).\n\nBaudrillard further illustrates the rhetorical distinctions between the model and the series by invoking examples of the model/series distinction. These encompass a wide range of consumer goods, including cars, refrigerators, dresses, and armchairs. For Baudrillard, a model armchair crafted in “steel and leather” and showcased at a particular venue “will crop up in aluminum and leatherette” at the local home furnishing store (System 158). Beyond illustrating technical and practical distinctions between the model and the series, this example emphasizes that the distinctions between the model and the series also include class and status distinctions. According to Baudrillard, the model and the series each mean something in so far as they comprise the two components of a dynamic system. One is not inherently better than the other. Rather, they depend upon each other for their meaning—the model as rhetorically distinguished from the series and the series as rhetorically distinguished from the model. Again, Baudrillard cites the example of the armchair to explain the relationship:\n\nSuppose that the uniqueness of the aforementioned armchair lies in its particular combination of tawny leather, black steel, general silhouette and mobilization of space. The corresponding serial object will emerge with plasticized leather, no tawniness, the metal lighter or galvanized, the overall configuration altered and\n\n49 According to Gary Genosko’s reading of Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, “[t]he model’s singularity is signified by the user’s strategies of personalisation by means of serialisations in a system-bound, internal transcendence” (Genosko, “Model” 129).\nthe relationship to space diminished. The object as a whole is thus destructured: its substance is assigned to the series of objects in imitation leather, its tawniness is now a brown common to thousands of other objects, its legs are indistinguishable from those of any tubular chair, and so on. The object is no longer anything more than a conglomeration of details and the crossroads of a variety of series. (System 160)\n\nHere, Baudrillard’s comments seem to convey an affinity or taste for well-crafted, high-end products. Implicit in this passage is the importance of method and material to craft and art. In much the same way that Baudrillard criticized Warhol’s method of mass producing silk-screened pieces that I discussed in chapter one, Baudrillard seems to be elevating the model and critiquing serialization in this passage. While such an interpretation of The System of Objects seems warranted if not highly plausible, Baudrillard’s purpose in The System of Objects is not to evaluate objects as good or bad in accordance with their methods and materials. Rather, he strives to evaluate the system of objects.\n\nThe system relies upon the dynamic between the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series, not the elevation of the model over the series. The notion that a model is “destructured” into a series should not be interpreted as degeneration, in which a model disintegrates into a series. For Baudrillard, the model should not be conceived as a point that then falls into the series. Rather, the model is, according to Baudrillard, “everywhere discernable in the series” and it should be conceived as an “inaccessible abstraction” (System 167). As he explains, “the model is basically an idea” (167). Models achieve “self-transcendence as series” lest they be swiftly replaced by another model.\nFor consumers to have access to the model armchair, the chair must be serialized. Indeed, the purchase of the serialized chair with its plasticized leather functions “as a mark of upward social mobility” (149). As Baudrillard recognizes, the serial chair increases the consumer’s access to the model: “anyone, in principle, via he humblest of objects, may partake of the model” (149).\n\nBesides providing the consumer with access, series offer the consumer choice. Whereas the rhetoric of the model consolidates access and ascribes choice to the producer in a way that connotes aristocracy, the rhetoric of the series relies upon manufactured differences to connote democracy. Baudrillard provides a general outline of the distinction:\n\nIn sum, the series offers the immense majority of people a restricted range of choices, while a tiny minority enjoy access to the model and its infinite nuances. For the majority a range which, however extensive it may be, is composed of invariable elements—generally the most obvious ones; for the minority a multitude of random possibilities. For the majority a set of coded values; for the minority endless invention. (System 161)\n\nAgain, in this passage, Baudrillard works to describe and analyze the dynamic ideology that drives the system of production and consumption. He is not evaluating, at least not overtly so, the rhetorics that manifest that ideology. He neither argues that one rhetoric is better than the other rhetoric, nor does he offer an all-encompassing assessment of the rhetorics. Instead, he focuses on the relationship between the model and the series, illustrating the ways in which there are both good and bad aspects—that is, different stakes—involving both the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series.\nBaudrillard’s discussion of the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series attempts to move beyond viewing the two rhetorics as oppositional. He argues that the “[s]eries and model should not be conceived of as two poles of a formal opposition” (System 154). In fact for Baudrillard, consumer choice among minute, inessential product features, like color, resoundingly indicates that the model and the series are not categorically opposed to one another. He contends that choice is conditioned by the fact that “[t]here are simply no more absolute models—and no more serial objects devoid of value categorically opposed to them” (153). Choice indicates that a dynamic ideology drives production and consumption. As Baudrillard notes, the ideology is manifested in the reciprocal rhetorics of the model and of the series, in which “the series hews ever more narrowly to the model, while the model is continually being diffused into the series” (150). Here, Baudrillard identifies a dynamic convergence of the model and the series. Whether an analysis begins with the model and diffuses downward or whether it begins with the series and hews upward, the analytic trajectory leads to the same point—but the rhetoric of those analyses maintains a distinction between the model and the series.\n\nThe Range of Critical Practice in Rhetorical Studies\n\nWhen scholars conceive of or, as Grey prefers, “talk about” rhetorical criticism as production and consumption, they suggest that the practice or “doing” of rhetorical criticism can be understood metacritically as a perpetual dynamic that manifests itself in the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series. An investigation of how rhetorical criticism is practiced according to methods and theory suggests that method-based\ncriticism invokes the rhetoric of the model, while concept-based criticism invokes the rhetoric of the series.\n\nDistinctive similarities connect method-based criticism with the rhetoric of the model, so much so that method and model appear to share the same script. First, the practice of method-based criticism is patterned on the idea of the model. As Black notes, method-based criticism takes cues from the scientific model of inquiry, in which methods are used to test a model and then contribute to that model. Second, method-based criticism, as Jasinski claims, progresses deductively from the model to the theory and then to the method, in much the same way that the rhetoric of the model implies that the model is the major object from which the series is deduced. Third, method-based criticism works to forward models. Either a piece of method-based criticism replicates the model or it replaces the model.\n\nThough not synonymous, methods and models remain closely connected, as Frank D’Angelo’s 2010 “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality” demonstrates. D’Angelo’s essay deploys the rhetoric of the model as it outlines six new methods of rhetorical criticism. The essay, according to D’Angelo, bridges rhetorical criticism as practiced in rhetoric and writing with rhetorical criticism as practiced in rhetoric and speech, promotes “new strategies for producing discourse,” and refines the critical understanding of rhetorical theory (32). D’Angelo wants to provide rhetorical critics with “alternative ways of thinking” and these ways of thinking are methods that apply to intertextual rhetorical objects. The specific methods outlined by D’Angelo number five: (1) adaptation, (2) retro, (3) appropriation, (3) parody, (4) pastiche, (5) simulation. Although D’Angelo often refers to these methods as concepts, he uses them as critical methods. His essay is\nbroken into five sections—one for each method—and in each section he elaborates the critical method and then applies it to an intertextual object. In the section that treats simulation, D’Angelo draws upon the work of Baudrillard to outline simulation as a method. Then, he applies simulation to the reality television show *The Apprentice* and the videogame *Spore* to suggest the way in which simulation opens up new understandings of the ways in which intertexts imitate, mimic, and fake reality. D’Angelo expressly states his intention for this method of criticism to be replicated. In his conclusion, he reiterates his hope that “this excursion into the rhetoric of intertextuality would enable teachers and students, in their roles as rhetorical critics, to understand new strategies for producing discourse and to give them alternative ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, rhetorical invention, genre, arrangement, and audience” (43). Thus, D’Angelo’s essay deploys the rhetoric of the model in order to emphasize his method. The essay positions Baudrillardian simulation as a model of criticism intended for replication and, in doing so, it reveals the close association between method-based criticism and the rhetoric of the model.\n\nJust as methods and models share close associations, series and theories also share close associations, with conceptually oriented criticism often invoking the rhetoric of the series. First, concept-based criticism affords the rhetorical critic some choice during the critical act and this choice resembles the range of choices that the rhetoric of the series presents a consumer. While I do not want to suggest that the choices of the rhetorical critic are inessential to the critical product in the way that Baudrillard describes the choices associated with the series, the similarity between concept-based criticism and the rhetoric of the series is located in the interest behind these choices. Concept-based\ncriticism starts “with an interest” that is located with the rhetorical critic, just as the series affords the consumer an opportunity to execute choices in his or her interest—he or she makes choices driven by the self-interest to accrue status, value, or distinction (Jasinski, “The Status” 256; Baudrillard, System 154). Second, a confluence exists between conceptually oriented criticism and the rhetoric of the series in that both involve necessarily incomplete or unfinished products. Conceptually oriented criticism is, as both Jasinski and Grey note, a work in progress. The critic investigates a concept, hoping that his or her criticism “can serve as the conceptual ground for further critical inquiry” (Jasinski, “The Status” 256). Thus, conceptually oriented criticism understands critical activity as constantly progressing in terms of a sequence, in which one critical product follows another critical product with each product distinguishing itself from its predecessor. The rhetoric of the series works in much the same way, in that it depends upon a sequencing of products, each with their own variants and distinguishing traits. Both concept-based criticism and the rhetoric of the series depend upon subsequent products for progress. But while a concept or a series progresses, it neither reaches a point of completion nor a point of finality.\n\nCarolyn Miller’s 2003 “Writing in a Culture of Simulation” illustrates the point that no line between one concept and another concept, or one series and another series, can be definitively drawn. As it investigates the relationships between the concepts of simulation, rhetoric, writing, culture, and ethos, Miller’s piece mobilizes the rhetoric of the series in order to answer the question: “What effect does the culture of simulation have on writing, or rhetorical action more generally?” (60). Miller’s article invokes the Baudrillardian concept of simulation, not as an approach to understanding a text as\nD’Angelo did, but rather as a concept that invites reflection as it is seen in relation to other concepts. Thus, Miller’s essay can be considered a piece of conceptually oriented criticism. Miller’s invocation of Baudrillardian simulation invokes the rhetoric of the series, in that it references Baudrillardian *simulation* through the work of Sherry Turkle. Turkle, as Miller explains, “takes the term *simulation* from Jean Baudrillard, who maintains that the proliferation of signs in contemporary society has ‘imploded’ the distinction between the real and the simulated” (60). Miller’s conceptualization of simulation is different from Baudrillard’s own. For example, after offering a comparison between Plato and Baudrillard, she concludes that “we will gain more by seeing simulation as a natural human capability than we will by attempting to escape or avoid it” (77). Here, Miller is advancing a new concept of simulation that significantly departs from Baudrillardian simulation. The rhetoric of the series shows how the progression from Baudrillard to Turkle to Miller gives way to variation among a similar group of concepts. Whereas Baudrillard explains simulation as an agent-less process, Miller chooses to think of the concept as “natural human capability” (77). Thus, in this conceptually oriented piece of criticism, Miller invokes the rhetoric of the series, presenting the concept of simulation as a work in progress, a sequenced variety, as it passes through Baudrillard to Turkle and to herself.\n\nIt is important to acknowledge that, although I have used D’Angelo’s essay to illustrate the close proximity of method-based criticism to the rhetoric of the model and Miller’s essay to illustrate the close proximity of conceptually oriented criticism to the rhetoric of the series, I am not suggesting that the two kinds of criticism (method-based and concept-based) are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, method-based criticism and\nconcept-based criticism are perpetually engaged in a dynamic relationship that heads towards the same point—even in the essays by D’Angelo and Miller. To reiterate my argument: Theory and method maintain a relationship in rhetorical criticism, no matter the kind. Their dynamic relationship, however, relies upon the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series. While these two rhetorics can be used to distinguish method-based criticism from concept-based criticism, these two rhetorics can also be used to illustrate the dynamic relationship between the two kinds of criticism. Here, I note that the five categories of methods upon which D’Angelo concentrates are concepts in and of themselves. D’Angelo acknowledges the dynamic relationship between method-based criticism and conceptually oriented criticism, as he articulates his purpose of “discussing and exemplifying concepts” that relate to intertexts (33). Likewise, Miller breaks from the rhetoric of the series when she begins referencing Baudrillard’s discussion of simulation in *Simulacra and Simulations* instead of Turkle’s discussion of simulation in *Life on the Screen*. In effect, Miller’s referencing of Baudrillard and not Turkle disrupts the serial progression of the concept—from Baudrillard to Turkle to Miller—and positions Baudrillard’s discussion of the concept as the model discussion. For this brief moment in Miller’s piece when the series moves toward the model, the dynamic relationship between theory and method becomes apparent. Both D’Angelo’s essay and Miller’s essay support an understanding of rhetorical criticism as a productive industry that involves a dynamic relationship between method and theory and both draw upon the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series to illustrate this dynamic.\nThe way in which the productive dynamic between method and theory develops often results in a wide range of critical products. The stakes attached to these products are extremely high, for when rhetorical criticism manufactures a product, it is often also manufacturing a person—that is to say that the critical product often works to build a rhetorical theorist. Over the past twenty years, rhetorical critics have increasingly drawn upon the work of Jean Baudrillard in its scholarship, effectively positioning Baudrillard as a notable, if not controversial, rhetorical theorist. His *Simulacra and Simulation* has, in fact, been recognized by Michelle Ballif and Diane Davis as one of twenty texts that anyone new to research in the area of rhetoric and poststructuralism “must read” (Ratcliffe, “The Twentieth” 186). Additionally, in the tenth chapter of Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp’s *Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric*, Baudrillard is profiled as a thinker who has “exerted a profound influence on contemporary rhetorical theory” (Waveland). Although these constructions of Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist are largely favorable, other constructions are much less so. In what follows, I outline the stakes attached to two critical products by examining the way in which they construct Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist. By tracing the dynamic between method and theory in these critical products, I aim to show the importance of this dynamic in the construction of Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist.\n\nThe first product is Thomas Rickert’s treatment of Baudrillard in his 2007 book *Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject*. This treatment comprises a conceptually oriented piece of criticism in that it largely focuses on the theoretical concept of cynicism and primarily discusses Baudrillard in terms of that concept. In this piece, Rickert explores postmodern cynicism as a limit to writing\nteachers’ attempts to cultivate a “critical sensibility” in writing students (166). Rickert’s treatment of Baudrillard might aptly be described as a piece of comparative metacriticism, for Rickert compares two previous treatments of Baudrillard by two rhetorical scholars, Lester Faigley and Victor Vitanza, in order to forward his claim about cynicism. Mobilizing the rhetoric of the series, Rickert reviews the two earlier treatments paying careful attention to the epistemological backing of each treatment. In Rickert’s view, Faigley’s treatment of Baudrillard focuses on Baudrillard’s challenge to the meaning-making ability of signs, but ignores Baudrillard’s dismissal of critique. Moreover, Faigley “retains the modernist hope for overcoming the instability of the sign” through critique (Rickert 169). As Rickert explains, the way in which Faigley’s treatment of Baudrillard retains a hope for critique contrasts markedly with the way in which Vitanza’s treatment of Baudrillard endorses abandonment. Rickert illuminates the contrast and clarifies that if Faigley searches for a space from which to critique, “Vitanza advocates abandonment—abandonment of those critical enterprises that ultimately depend on interpretive procedures motivated by the desire to control signs” (Rickert 169). According to Rickert, Vitanza finds in Baudrillard an ally who questions the meaning-making nature of signs and the effectiveness of critique. For Rickert, Vitanza’s treatment of Baudrillard embraces postmodernity more fully than Faigley’s treatment and is, therefore, more amenable to Baudrillardian thought.\n\nRickert’s criticism invokes the rhetoric of the series as it puts these treatments of Baudrillard into succession, moving the past treatments of Baudrillard forward into the present and considering them from a slightly different perspective. Although he remains vigilant in his reassessment of postmodern cynicism with respect to the writing\nclassroom, Rickert allows for Faigley’s representation of Baudrillard’s reputation to be carried forward without much scrutiny. Faigley’s 1992 book, *Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition*, casts Baudrillard as a theorist whose rhetorical theories do not jibe with the critique-based, cultural studies, composition pedagogies of the early 1990s. Specifically, Faigley introduces Baudrillard to his readers as easily dismissible “[b]ecause Baudrillard is hostile to French feminism, perpetuates racial stereotypes, valorizes science and machines, sees California as utopia, theorizes politics as a play of signs, and is generally oblivious to human suffering” (Faigley 207). Faigley further compares Baudrillard to writing students, stating: “But in spite of the unrelenting cynicism of his position, I find Baudrillard valuable particularly in one respect: students often sound very much like him” (212). Throughout his treatment, Faigley mentions Baudrillard’s “profound cynicism” (216), and it is this final characterization—of Baudrillard as a cynic—that undoubtedly helps Rickert thicken his treatment of the concept of cynicism. Not surprisingly, Rickert does not challenge this characterization. However, Rickert does take issue with Faigley’s comparison of Baudrillard to students, questioning: “Who are these students that Faigley aligns with Baudrillard?” (Rickert 166). Although he questions Faigley’s description of writing students, Rickert does allow Faigley’s other characterizations of Baudrillard to proceed unchallenged. He mobilizes the rhetoric of the series and paraphrases Faigley, noting: “It is important to emphasize that Baudrillard is often seen as easily dismissible, ethically objectionable, and politically irresponsible, someone whose work is a cartoon-like caricature of perspicacious scholarship” (Rickert 166). To the detriment of Baudrillard’s reputation, Rickert’s deployment of the rhetoric of the series perpetuates an unsavory\ndepiction of Baudrillard by repeating it with only marginal difference. Here, the stakes are high, with Baudrillard standing to lose credibility. Instead of turning to the rhetoric of the model and locating an exemplary description of Baudrillard’s ethos, Rickert reverts to the rhetoric of the series and repeats a damaging fifteen-year-old characterization.\n\nWhile Rickert’s critical product serializes a particularly unsavory construction of a rhetorical theorist, a second critical product challenges similar characterizations by invoking the rhetoric of the model. In her 2001 book, *Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure*, Michelle Ballif deploys Baudrillard’s move of seduction (another name for disappearance) in order to initiate exchange and augment his reputation. As its title implies, Ballif’s book employs seduction as a move with which to initiate and sustain exchange. Beyond simply drawing upon Baudrillardian seduction as a conceptual support for her own argument, Ballif’s argument patterns itself after Baudrillard’s own writing. Ballif’s deployment of seduction imitates Baudrillard’s exemplary sophistic deployment of disappearance, as both work in service of the method of exchange. Through this mimetic gesture, Ballif invokes the rhetoric of the model.\n\nBallif applies seduction to the reception of three thinkers, all of whom have been considered misogynists, with the goal of rupturing values, questioning assumptions, and dissolving established logics. Using seduction as a move in service of exchange, Ballif challenges the conventional assessments of Gorgias, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard. As she explains, “by using a Baudrillardian strategy of extremes (more Woman than Woman, more sophistic than sophistic),” she aims “to clear a space for the Third Woman, the Third sophistic, for *what will have been* the other Other” (61). Here, Ballif describes the creation of an ambivalent space, one in which rhetorical figures and rhetorical theories\nmay circulate freely without fixed meaning. As Ballif articulates it, her project is\n“concerned finally with the seduction of Woman—that is, unthinking her, unrepresenting\nher” (5). She explicitly indicates that she borrows her method from Baudrillard and she\nrepeats Baudrillard’s radical ethic in her own work (10-11; 12). Her task is one of testing\nand replicating method with reference to Baudrillard’s model method. She works to\nseduce or unrepresent the rhetorical figure of “woman” in her analyses of Gorgias,\nNietzsche, and Baudrillard. Significantly, Ballif mobilizes the rhetoric of the model to\nsalvage what little is left of these thinkers’ reputations, even moving to recover some of\nthe reputation that has been lost by these thinkers. Additionally, she remains overt about\nher critical method and clear about her debts to a model method throughout the text.\n\nIn her writing, she maintains the distinction between production and seduction,\npushing arguments and language to extremes in order to challenge the productive,\nmeaning-making drive of rhetoric. Ballif draws extensively from Baudrillard’s text\n_Seduction_, in order to articulate the ways in which her arguments exceed conventional\nbinaries and logical limits. Referencing Baudrillard’s notion of seduction as supposing\n“the minimum reversibility which puts an end to every fixed opposition and, therefore,\nevery conventional semiology,” she argues that rhetoric operates unconventionally\n(Baudrillard, _Seduction_ 103-4; Ballif 149). According to Ballif, “the seductive attraction\nof signs resist the logical coupling, the shotgun wedding that conventional semiology,\nrational discourse, and communication imposes” (149). The strategy of seduction and the\n“radical new relationship to language” that it requires manifests itself in the poetic\nplayfulness of Ballif’s writing (147). Whereas Baudrillard’s own writing moved towards\nthe aphorism and other forms of “theory-fiction” to champion disappearance, Ballif’s\nwriting champions seduction by employing a sub/versive form of writing rhetorical histories. Here, Ballif follows the historiographies of Vitanza by mobilizing, albeit to a lesser degree, a sub/versive form of writing. This kind of writing is quite similar to Baudrillard’s own writing, in that it attempts to strategically exploit areas of ambiguity in language, messes with convention, and works against “‘[o]rderly’ presentation and ‘clarity’” (Vitanza, “‘Notes’” 109). This seductiveness occurs in lines such as: “within the realm of production, the aim of the speaking subject is to make language articulate truth, to ‘real-ise’ being, in all its clarity and simplicity, to indite (and indict) its meaning” (Ballif 148). In this line, Ballif describes the production of rhetoric, but the playfulness of her writing—her use of hyphens and parentheses to invoke double meanings—encapsulates the significant challenge that seduction poses to production.\n\nSeduction provides Ballif with a move through which she can initiate and sustain exchange, through which she can propel characterization of Baudrillard as a misogynist into an ambivalent rhetorical space. Deploying the unconventional semiology of seduction, Ballif reviews readings of Baudrillard that characterize him as a misogynist. She then posits the signifiers “Woman” and “the feminine” as instances of “rhetorical tropings,” which occur throughout Baudrillard’s work (145). As Ballif explains, “[‘the feminine’] is not a known term; it is not a gender; it is a challenge, a challenge to the comfortable binaries which sustain truth, a challenge to our social, gender coding” (145).50 By embracing the challenge in Baudrillard’s writing, Ballif works against the notion that one can “know” what the “true” meaning of “the feminine” is, and thus provides Baudrillard with some respite from claims of misogyny.\n\n50 This definition is strikingly similar to Luce Irigaray’s definition of feminine.\nAs the examples of Rickert and Ballif illustrate, the stakes involved in the\ndynamic that drives rhetorical criticism are extremely high. In both of these pieces of\ncriticism, the critical product’s tendency to focus more on theory than method, in\nRickert’s case, or more on method than theory, in Ballif’s case, results in the invocation\nof the rhetoric of the series and the rhetoric of the model respectively. These differing\nrhetorical invocations afford each critic different sets of critical options and these\ndifferent affordances result in much different critical work constructing rhetorical\ntheorists. Rickert’s invocation of the rhetoric of the series compels him to carry certain\nunflattering past representations of Baudrillard into the present, as the rhetoric of the\nseries maintains uniformity in spite of differences. Ballif’s invocation of the rhetoric of\nthe model enables her to test the Baudrillardian approach of challenging representation\nagainst Baudrillard’s reputation as a misogynist. For her, the rhetoric of the model allows\nher to test, nuance, and largely combat the unified charges of misogyny against Gorgias,\nNietzsche, and Baudrillard. Taken together, these two pieces demonstrate the way in\nwhich the method and theory dynamic drives the critical industry. Not only does the\ndynamic allow critics to practice criticism in different ways, but the difference in\ncriticism exerts a significant impact on the reputation of particular individuals as they are\nconstructed into rhetorical theorists.\n\nRhetoric, Reality, and Rhetorical Criticism: A Series of Three Model Questions\n\nAs the case of Jean Baudrillard illustrates, although rhetorical criticism is an\nindustry that churns out critical products, one of the industry’s by-products is the\nmanufacturing of rhetorical theorists. The production of rhetorical theorists as by-\nproducts of the industry that is rhetorical criticism constitutes a problematic occurrence for some individuals in rhetorical studies. In this section, I consider Baudrillard’s own comments about his theory of the simulacrum and his notion of simulation in order to assess his position as a rhetorical theorist. My analysis reveals that Baudrillard was indeed a critic of his own rhetoric, in that he often contemplated the products of his work that were generated by the theory and method dynamic.\n\nIn “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” Dilip Gaonkar criticizes this making of rhetorical theorists by outlining what he refers to as the dialectic of explicit and implicit rhetorical analysis. For Gaonkar, the dialectic leads to the conclusion that “there is no exit from rhetoric” (75). As Gaonkar outlines this problem, a critic can “always redescribe any text, both in terms of what it says and what it does, in terms of unconscious deployment of rhetorical categories” (75). Gaonkar also examines the corollary to this claim; namely, that a critic can always redescribe a theorist in terms of what that theorist says and what that theorist does. Curiously, he associates the hunt for rhetoric in a text with the construction of rhetorical theorists:\n\n[I]t is not uncommon to find that those who are celebrated as masters of “implicit rhetorical analysis” react indifferently, if not with hostility, to such interpretations of their work. To the best of my knowledge, none of these masters (and the list is formidable: Kuhn, Feyerabend, Gadamer, Habermas; Toulmin is the possible exception) so far has either conceded that what they have been doing all along is a form of rhetorical reading, or gone on to incorporate rhetorical vocabulary in their subsequent work. (74)\nHere, Gaonkar offers a synopsis of the globalization of rhetoric, what Alan Gross and William Keith gloss as “a circular strategy of recovering rhetoric as a universal phenomenon by prefiguring it as something suppressed or hidden” (7; emphasis original). As Gross and Keith summarize it, the globalization of rhetoric that Gaonkar critiques enables the construction of rhetorical theorists: “there are many ‘rhetorical’ theorists (e.g. Thomas Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin) who only use the word occasionally and have no grounding in the ‘tradition’—but we can see their work is actually rhetorical anyway, provided we can (re-)describe it properly” (7; emphasis original).\n\nEvidently, one of Gaonkar’s central concerns is the basis upon which individuals are constructed as rhetorical theorists through interpretive work. This concern is an issue in rhetorical criticism that treats Baudrillard. Although Baudrillard employs the word “rhétoirique” no fewer than forty times throughout his work, rhetorical critics have been reluctant to engage with these usages. Instead, as my review of the essays by D’Angelo and Miller demonstrates, critics quite often implicitly analyze the rhetoric of Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum and his notion of simulation. Gaonkar, himself, appears to participate in the very globalization of rhetoric that he decries at the end of “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science.” Gaonkar’s interrogation of rhetorical studies concludes by suggesting that rhetorical studies of science—the test case throughout his essay—overstep the bounds of rhetoric. His piece refers to Baudrillard’s simulacrum in its concluding metaphor: “No one doubts that rhetoric functions as a mixer, sometimes as a sweetner, but,” Gaonkar asks, “can one argue that science is a simulacrum (in Baudrillard’s sense), a rhetorical construction without reference?” (“Idea” 77). Here, Gaonkar uses a metaphor to implicitly interpret the Baudrillardian simulacrum\nas rhetorical, in order to suggest a point at which rhetoric references no reality. As the question implies, Gaonkar takes issue with rhetorical criticism that operates at this point; that is to say that Gaonkar is suspicious of studies which argue for rhetoric’s primacy as opposed to reality’s primacy. At the heart of Gaonkar’s claims are three questions of reference: (1) What reference points do critics have for considering the Baudrillardian simulacrum to be rhetorical? (2) What reference points do critics have for constructing Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist? (3) To what degree does rhetoric reference reality? In the remainder of this section, I draw upon Baudrillard’s writing to suggest some answers to these questions.\n\nTo answer the first question, rhetorical critics must first understand the concept of the Baudrillardian simulacrum. Such an understanding begins by recognizing that, as the title of Baudrillard’s *Simulacra and Simulation* suggests, the terms *simulacra* and *simulation* belong to the same conceptual framework for Baudrillard. Also included in this framework are other terms, among them the term *hyperreal*. Although these terms are closely related, Baudrillard distinguishes between them: *Simulacra* is the plural of the singular *simulacrum*, and Baudrillard’s treatment of simulacra suggests that there are kinds of simulacra, each associated with historical eras. Indeed, as William Pawlett notes, the concept of the simulacrum is most often associated with Plato’s *Sophist* and “is usually understood as constituting a problem for thought because it raises the issues of\n\n51 The hyperreal is emphasized, for instance, in Michael MacDonald’s “Encomium of Hegel.” MacDonald invokes the hyperreal during a discussion of Plato’s *Sophist*. He describes “the sophist haunt[ing] the ‘darkling’ realm of non-being, the underworld of icons, phantasms, and falsehoods mapped out by the Stranger from Elea in [Plato’s] *Sophist*” (31). MacDonald connects these mapped falsehoods with Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal. A footnote makes this connection clear, while simultaneously relegating Baudrillard to marginalia: “This is Jean Baudrillard’s description of a ‘hyperreal’ society” (41, note 19).\n\n52 For an exceptional discussion of the Baudrillardian simulacrum, see Merrin.\nfalsity and untruth‖ (―Simulacra‖ 196). Baudrillard, for his part, offers a genealogy of simulacra in *Symbolic Exchange and Death*. Yet, Baudrillard’s notion of the *simulacrum* departs from the Platonic understanding of the term and instead follows Nietzsche and Klossowski in arguing that the simulacrum is “that which ‘hides truth’s non-existence’” (Pawlett 196).\n\nBaudrillard traces at least four kinds, or orders, of simulacra throughout his oeuvre. The third-order simulacra—which are also the simulacra of the contemporary era—are germane to the present discussion since they are dependent upon a process of copying called *simulation*. Simulation is literally the action behind Baudrillard’s theory. Simulation describes action; it nominalizes the verb *simulate*. As Pawlett explains, the verb *simulate* possess Latin roots and comes from the word *simulare*, which means “to ‘make like’” (―Simulacra‖ 196). Baudrillard frequently employs the verb *simulate* in his work; however, the nominalization of the verb *simulate* in the term *simulation* emphasizes that there is no agent orchestrating simulation. Thus, *simulation* refers to an active, agent-less process in which things are “made like” (Pawlett, “Simulacra” 196). Baudrillard is more specific about the process—explaining it as a process during which a copy makes like (or copies) another copy. This process of copying continues infinitely, as Baudrillard famously asserts: “Simulation is characterized by a *precession of the model*” (*Simulacra* 16; emphasis original).\n\nAccordingly, I arrive at a response to the question: What reference points do critics have for considering the Baudrillardian simulacrum to be rhetorical? Critics have a good number of reference points for considering the Baudrillardian simulacrum to be\n\n---\n\n53 See John Muckelbauer, who employs Deleuze to read Plato’s *Sophist*.\n54 Baudrillard associates simulation with phases, schemas, and processes. It is important to note that simulation determines only one era of simulacra. Thus, simulation is the more specific term.\nrhetorical. First, as an understanding of the simulacrum and the process of simulation reveals, both are characterized by the method/model and theory/series dynamic. By choosing to refer to simulation as a precession of models, Baudrillard combines the imitative capacity of the model with the sequential ordering of the series, locking the two concepts in a perpetual dynamic. He even acknowledges that “[t]here are simply no more absolute models—and no more serial objects devoid of value categorically opposed to them” (153). Thus, the simulacrum is a rhetorical product driven by the dynamic that involves the rhetoric of the model and the rhetoric of the series. Second, the Baudrillardian simulacrum can indeed be interpreted as implying rhetoric. The concepts of the model and the series have been independently invoked with reference to writing, art, thought, and reasoning. Thus, the very concepts that comprise the simulacrum could be interpreted as describing rhetoric. Third, the rhetorical nature of the term is substantiated by the confusion surrounding its meaning. As Plato would have scholars remember, the very definition of the word simulacrum requires rhetorical activity.\n\nTo answer the second question, rhetorical critics must consider Baudrillard’s uses of the word rhetoric. Although there are over forty such instances in Baudrillard’s writing, I will focus upon one instance in which he most directly couples the word rhetoric with the simulacrum and the notion of simulation. This instance occurs in The Perfect Crime, a text that explores the relationship between reality and illusion. In a chapter titled “Radical Thought,” Baudrillard positions the simulacrum as an empirically falsifiable scientific theory, in the Popperian sense. For Baudrillard, the idea of the simulacrum is a hypothesis—or, as Karl Popper would call it, a conjecture—that has been\nforwarded so as to enable refutability, or falsifiability. Baudrillard theorizes the third order simulacrum—that is, the one defined by simulation—as an era beyond representation and reproduction; it is an order without reference to reality. As a scientific theory, the third order simulacrum invites falsification by reality. According to Baudrillard, “you put forth the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that the real will refute it (the guarantee of scientificity for Popper)” (Perfect 102). But, as Baudrillard further notes, no refutation has been offered by reality. Baudrillard writes:\n\nAlas, only the fanatical supporters of reality react; reality, for its part, does not seem to wish to prove you wrong. Quite to the contrary, every kind of simulacrum parades around in it. And reality, filching the idea, henceforth adorns itself with all the rhetoric of simulation. It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth, but the fact that there isn’t any—that is to say the continuity of nothing. (102)\n\nInstead of reality refuting the theory of the simulacrum, Baudrillard contends that reality steals the idea and “adorns itself with all the rhetoric of simulation” (102). Here, Baudrillard couples rhetoric with the concept of simulation in a way that not only suggests that simulation is rhetoric, but in a way that also positions him as a rhetorical critic.\n\n---\n\n55 Popper, in *The Logic of Scientific Discovery* endorses falsifiability over verifiability as the logical criterion for science, stating: “I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: *it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience*” (40-1). Later works by Popper, especially *Conjectures and Refutations*, differentiate between three types of theories: (1) logical and mathematical; (2) empirical and scientific; and, (3) philosophical and metaphysical. Popper claims that the third group of theories are irrefutable, although discussable (197-9). Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum would appear to be vulnerable to accusations that it is not a scientific theory. But, this accusation leads to a circularity, especially if scientific knowledge is deemed to be rhetoric.\nThis passage resoundingly answers the second question—What reference points do critics have for constructing Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist?—with many multiple affirmative replies. In this passage, Baudrillard engages in the productive industry driven by the dynamic of method and theory. Thus, he is functioning as a rhetorical critic. He is critiquing rhetoric in which he himself was involved. As he describes it, he began with a scientific model, that of Popperian falsifiability, and tested that model on reality. According to his critical recounting—which invokes a rather strong rhetoric of the model—no refutations were offered. By embracing refutation, Baudrillard invites a challenge; yet, by receiving no refutation, Baudrillard’s method is reinforced. When he assumes the role of a rhetorical critic, it becomes quite clear that he is indeed a rhetorical theorist. He experiments with language to provoke responses.\n\nOf course, Baudrillard’s comments in this chapter work to answer the third and final question that I have posed above: To what degree does rhetoric reference reality? Baudrillard’s description of “the rhetoric of simulation” proposes a theory of rhetoric which resembles that rhetoric forwarded by Alan G. Gross in *The Rhetoric of Science*. Gross conceives of rhetoric as constitutive of science and implies that reality is rhetorical. Gross’s theory of rhetoric in this 1990 text embraces “the possibility that the claims of science are solely the products of persuasion” (3). Thus, reality works persuasively “all the way down” (3). By situating his writing in terms of Popper’s work on falsifiability, Baudrillard argues that reality is rhetoric, to use Gross’s phrase, “all the way down,” at least until this theory of rhetoric is refuted (3). Baudrillard appears to offer a slightly\n\n56 Gross’s argument was of course exemplary of the type of rhetoric scholarship to which Gaonkar’s piece reacted. In *Starring the Text* (2006), Gross puts this earlier argument into perspective. Whether this perspective softens Gross’s earlier stance or not, Gross does achieve some distance from this claim by taking a generational approach to the rhetoric of science.\nqualified version of Gross’s theory in the above passage. Baudrillard aligns the relationship between the rhetoric of simulation and reality with the relationship between the rhetoric of the series and the rhetoric of the model: both relationships depend upon exchange; both relationships should be dynamic.\n\nReturning to Gaonkar’s concerns about the globalization of rhetoric, Baudrillard’s comments about the rhetoric of simulation approximate Gaonkar’s explanation of reality as “a rhetorical construction without reference” (“Idea” 77). Yet, in regards to the impact of this relationship on rhetorical criticism, Gaonkar seems to depart from “Baudrillard’s sense” of the rhetoric of simulation (“Idea” 77). Gaonkar views simulation as a limit to, or a boundary of, rhetorical criticism, but this view ignores the way in which Baudrillard qualifies “the rhetoric of simulation” in The Perfect Crime. For Baudrillard, rhetoric admits the possibility and even invites the act of refutation: The rhetoric of simulation constitutes reality, until it is falsified. Contra Gaonkar, Baudrillard appears to encourage more rhetoric, more refutations, and more conjectures. Thus, Baudrillard’s “rhetoric of simulation” affords rhetorical criticism a larger province. Baudrillard’s use of the word rhetoric, here, seems to conclude that rhetoric invites rhetoric, that rhetoric challenges rhetoric, that rhetorics—like those of the model and those of the series—are dynamic.\n\n**Dynamism and Rhetoric**\n\nRhetorical criticism is both discussed and practiced as a productive industry and, as such, it needs to be understood as a dynamic relationship between the rhetoric the series and the rhetoric of the model. As Baudrillard explains, it is through this relationship and not an oppositional relationship that we can not only understand the\nsystem of production and consumption, but understand our work as rhetorical critics and as members of society. In both criticism and society there is a consistent productive dynamic. Although productivity might increase or seem to change, Baudrillard reminds us that “[e]verything is in movement, everything shifts before our eyes, everything is continually being transformed—yet nothing really changes” (System 167). It is with this perpetual, albeit consistent, movement that I return to Jasinski’s description of conceptually oriented criticism. According to Jasinski, one of the definitive features of conceptually oriented criticism is a process of abduction, “a back and forth tacking movement between the text and the concept” (256). Jasinski is correct to draw the attention of rhetorical critics to the movement of criticism. However, this tacking movement does not strike me as a unique aspect of any one kind of rhetorical criticism; rather, dynamic movement between method and theory is a definitive characteristic of all rhetorical criticism.\nChapter 5: Memorializing Method: Reconsidering the Reputations of Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida\n\nIn the previous chapter, I drew upon Baudrillard’s concepts of the model and the series to provide a meta-commentary on the stakes of scholarship in rhetorical studies that treats rhetorical theorists. As I reviewed pieces of scholarship that treat Baudrillard and his concepts, I argued that a renewed attention to rhetorical method in rhetorical criticism calls upon scholars to more critically examine their own rhetorical methods in the writing of their scholarship. Since it focused on the scholarly treatments of Baudrillardian simulation and the simulacrum in rhetorical studies, chapter four confined its argument to a kind of writing that is characteristic of academic discourse.\n\nThis chapter attempts to broaden my call for a renewed attention to rhetorical method by focusing on a kind of writing much more familiar to various audiences outside of the academy: the obituary. Obituaries function as a type of argument that proves familiar to multiple audiences, that supports a view of writing and rhetoric as representational, and that constructs an individual’s character, what is conventionally assumed to be a rhetor’s greatest appeal. This chapter analyzes a pair of obituaries in order to break with critical convention and argue that rhetorical method is as significant as ethos to rhetorical criticism. To support my call for a renewed attention to rhetorical method, I examine two instances of criticism which involved unflattering obituaries and their responses: Carlin Romano’s 2007 obituary of Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan\nKandell’s 2004 obituary of Jacques Derrida. After I analyze these two obituaries, I turn to the rhetorical methods of Baudrillard and Derrida themselves. While conventional responses to these obituaries could repudiate them for their negative tones and nasty messages, I contend that both theorists might actually have sanctioned these admittedly distasteful texts.\n\nTurning Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s theories on their own obituaries offers a revealing perspective on these two poststructuralist theorists as rhetoricians, as well as on the potentialities of poststructuralist rhetoric. Both obituaries recapitulate the well-worn arguments that had plagued each theorist’s reception in the academy, yet the argumentative *agon* that is commonplace in scholarship remains startlingly out-of-place in these obituaries. By disparaging each thinker, the obituaries argue that poststructuralist rhetorical theorists should not be taken seriously. But as I will demonstrate, each obituary paradoxically carves out a rhetorical space in which poststructuralist rhetoric provides critics with an analytical lens that considers the obituaries to be quite serious.\n\nObituaries and Convention\n\nObituaries are compositions published in any number of media outlets (newspapers, magazines, television, and internet) and defined by the occasion of death. They are often compared to eulogies, regularly interpreted as memorials to the recently deceased, and frequently categorized with other occurrences of ceremonial, or epideictic, rhetoric. As Bridget Fowler observes, obituaries adhere to a highly conventional\n\n---\n\n57 It could be argued that these obituaries constitute what John Schilb labels a *rhetorical refusal*, or “an act of writing or speaking in which the rhetor pointedly refuses to do what the audience considers rhetorically normal” (3). However, such an argument would depend upon establishing a principled, that is to say intentional, stance on the obituary writer’s part.\n“‘default’ model,” in which the deceased are honored through positive accolades and laudatory praise, or acknowledged through neutral recollections and objective recounting (Fowler 17; 244). Fowler sees the conventional obituary as adhering to the maxim: “Never speak ill of the dead” (123). Yet, Fowler also recognizes that there is an argumentative dimension to obituaries that raises questions “as to whether specific obituaries for individuals are largely subjective, value-laden assessments” (123). Whether audiences deem a given assessment to be largely subjective or largely objective, obituaries offer assessments of lives and, in doing so, argue for a particular interpretation of that life. Thus, the writing of an obituary is an act of criticism.\n\nWhile obituaries constitute a kind of argument that is familiar to multiple audiences inside and outside of the academy, they also involve a kind of writing that is emblematic of the view that rhetoric and writing work to represent reality. This understanding is espoused by Fowler’s description of the contemporary obituary as a piece of writing that “simultaneously reflects on an individual’s concrete, indeed unpredictable life, while also revalorising a certain view of the past” (11). Janice Hume further notes that obituary writing highlights attributes of deceased individuals, “and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal” (14). As a type of representational writing, obituaries are therefore significant for the way in which they construct the character of deceased individuals.\n\nIn Neo-Aristotelian terms, obituaries are significant for the way in which they represent ethos. Many rhetorical critics consider ethos to be the most significant aspect of\n\n---\n\nrhetoric, in that credibility persuades audiences more than any other appeal. Conceptions of ethos focus on what Gerard Hauser refers to as “the perceptions of the rhetor caused by his or her rhetoric,” and these perceptions might be related to a rhetor’s authority, credibility, reputation, or character (159). Hauser contends that ethos proves an interpretation between a rhetor and an audience generated by “choices of inclusion and exclusion” (148). As Hauser further acknowledges, “[h]ow we appear to others depends on the choices we make in presenting our messages and ourselves” (148). However, with regards to obituary writing, a deceased individual’s ethos is often constructed for that individual by an obituary writer. In other words, obituaries confirm that ethos is a social construct involving both representation and interpretation, but they complicate the notion that a rhetor directly influences the way in which he or she is perceived. Obituaries reveal that ethos can also be constructed in a second-hand manner, when one audience passes its perceptions of a rhetor along to a second audience.\n\nAs socially constructed arguments that function independently of the individuals that they represent, obituaries can rupture convention. Obituaries can offer distinctly negative representations of the deceased which violate the maxim: “Never speak ill of the dead.” These negative representations can weaken the authority, undermine the credibility, erode the reputation, and disparage the character of the deceased. As Fowler states, “[o]bituaries, on occasion, possess understated or secret subtexts which at the least add ambivalence and may introduce a clash between the right and the right, thus subtly transforming a celebratory recollection into an indictment” (17). This suggestion implies that certain obituaries might be predisposed to rhetorical analyses that employ a\nBaudrillardian approach, for certain obituaries create ambivalent rhetorical spaces which attribute an ambiguous legacy to the deceased.\n\nIn the following two sections, I examine two obituaries that do not predispose themselves to a Baudrillardian rhetorical analysis. Instead, Carlin Romano’s 2007 obituary of Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan Kandell’s 2004 obituary of Jacques Derrida argue for a resolutely negative interpretation of each respective thinker. The meanings forwarded by Romano and Kandell are quite clear and extremely unambiguous. Both Romano and Kandell radically challenge the conventional obituary in order to disparage the reputation and the work of Baudrillard and Derrida, respectively, yet their challenges maintain a conventional understanding of rhetoric and writing as representational and dependent upon a rhetor’s character. Romano and Kandell work to make meaning that is unflattering to each respective theorist.\n\nTo support my argument that Baudrillard and Derrida are two reputable rhetorical theorists, my analysis of each obituary will refute Romano and Kandell, in two ways. First, I will offer conventional counter-arguments, which consider rhetoric and writing to be representational and position ethos as the most important rhetorical appeal. In this first phase, my counter-arguments will blend my own commentary with the commentary of other scholars to refute the representations in each obituary. Second, I will counter the obituaries written by Romano and Kandell by turning Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s theories on those very obituaries. In this second phase, my analyses will forward unconventional arguments that consider rhetoric to be beyond representation and position rhetorical method as important to rhetoric as ethos. This second phase of analysis will\nargue that both theorists would actually sanction the admittedly distasteful obituaries written by Romano and Kandell.\n\nI. Romano’s Unconventional Obituary of Baudrillard\n\nOn March 23, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education—the “No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators” in the United States—printed an obituary of the seventy-seven year-old Jean Baudrillard (“About”). This particular obituary went to press two weeks after Baudrillard’s death, and a mere two months before The Chronicle would be recognized as one of “the 10 most credible news sources” by the Erdos & Morgan survey (“About”). The obituary appeared in the “Critical at Large” section of The Chronicle, and was distributed to The Chronicle’s 350,000 readers, 70,000 of whom are academics (“About”). The obituary’s title proclaimed that “The Death of Jean Baudrillard Did Happen,” and subsequent printings of the same obituary in different publications announced the “Death of a Clown.”\n\nSince this obituary was published on March 23, 2007 (over two weeks after Baudrillard’s March 7, 2007 death), Romano read, referenced, and assembled these other, earlier obituaries of Baudrillard into a conventional value system that describes obituary writing as polite. Romano suggests that obituary writing values politeness, a value that reinforces the “‘default’ model” of obituary writing. Romano’s obituary notes that newspapers have “provided blunt takes on [Baudrillard]” and that these treatments exhibit a range of politeness. For instance, Romano acknowledges that London’s The Times “politely” describes Baudrillard’s writing, while London’s The Daily Telegraph\n“less politely” treats Baudrillard. Romano’s own obituary breaks with the conventional values of being more or less polite, as it unabashedly and vociferously attacks Baudrillard, his work, and his writing.\n\nIn this particular obituary, *Chronicle* writer Carlin Romano forwards a distinctly negative representation of Baudrillard, memorializing Baudrillard by assembling a litany of disparaging remarks issued, at one time or another, against him. Throughout the obituary, Romano positions Baudrillard as a hypocrite who viewed the academy as a business. According to Romano, on the one hand, Baudrillard denounced “modern consumerism,” and, on the other hand, Baudrillard exploited consumerism by accepting “innumerable free trips, honorariums, lecture invitations, visiting appointments and publishing contracts.” Romano attacks Baudrillard’s popularity by characterizing Baudrillard as typifying a “brand” of French academics elevated “to superstardom precisely because they perform the dance of opaqueness best.” For Romano, Baudrillard’s incomprehensibility contributed to his popularity. Romano claims that “intentionally obscure French philosophy is an established performance art; there’s money to be made, appointments to be secured, prestige to be garnered,” and that Baudrillard’s work ascribed to this performative paradigm. Nonetheless, Romano speculates that Baudrillard “may be the screw-up who endangered the brand.” That is to say that Romano suggests that Baudrillard’s work was overly obscure and excessively performative. Here, the similarities between Lester Faigley’s portrayal of Baudrillard in his 1992 *Fragments of Rationality* and Romano’s depiction of Baudrillard some fifteen years later are striking. Faigley also associates Baudrillardian thought with brands, branding, and brand consciousness. In particular, Faigley links Baudrillard and his\nwriting to college students and their writing on account of a supposed fluency with brand-name consciousness (*Fragments* 212-5). Romano implies that the obscurity and excessiveness of Baudrillard’s work might be attributed to branding and marketability—and thus to Baudrillard’s desire to make money. Although Romano’s comments leave any academic who receives remuneration for publications and lectures vulnerable to the label of “entrepreneur,” Romano’s assessment of Baudrillard is particularly unforgiving.\n\nRomano’s negative assessment of Baudrillard’s life stems from an aversion to Baudrillard’s writing. Romano reinforces his characterization of Baudrillard as little more than an opportunist by describing his work as “simplistic,” “outrageous,” “miserable,” “false,” and containing “blithe idiocies.” According to Romano, Baudrillard’s writing constitutes a “hodgepodge of undefined abstractions,” of which few individuals can comprehend. “His sentences,” gripes Romano, “often didn’t make sense.” For Romano, there is little substance in Baudrillard’s writing. Romano likens Baudrillard’s writing to hiccups, and doubts that Baudrillard was ever asked to edit or rewrite his prose. Frequently, Romano absolves himself from the personal responsibility for some commentary by quoting critical comments about Baudrillard’s writing. Here, Romano might be said to be magnanimous, as he selects one quotation from among Baudrillard’s persecutors, Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, and another quotation from “one of Baudrillard’s shepherds,” Mark Poster, yet both quotations present Baudrillard’s writing unfavorably. Romano, however, hammers home the point: Baudrillard’s “published writings were so bad and his publicity-hound manner so obvious that the image of incomprehensibility and clownishness attached itself to the respectful profile drawn by his advocates and they couldn’t rub it off.”\nThe argument presented by Romano’s obituary departs from the conventional obituary in that it is unambiguously negative. Romano’s obituary argues that Baudrillard and his work are of little value, and Romano supports this argument by characterizing Baudrillard as an incomprehensible clown throughout. In Romano’s opinion, Baudrillard, his work, and his writing are farces that should not be taken seriously. His conclusion states the argument more emphatically. In his closing, Romano lays Baudrillard to rest by noting: “No fraud survives his enablers.” He then brazenly forecasts the future reception of Baudrillard, asserting that “No one will read Baudrillard in 50 years.”\n\nAlthough no one—not even Romano—knows whether or not Baudrillard will be read in fifty years, Romano’s argument that Baudrillard and his work are of little value relies upon representations of Baudrillard that can be contested through alternative interpretations. Accordingly, the first phase of my analysis will argue that Baudrillard, his work, and his writing are valuable by disputing Romano’s representation of Baudrillard. This phase of my analysis will employ a traditional rhetorical approach, in that it will be premised upon the notion that rhetoric and writing are representational, as well as the understanding that an appeal based upon character is a rhetorician’s most significant appeal.\n\n_A Conventional Analysis of Romano’s Obituary of Baudrillard_\n\nRomano’s representation of Baudrillard, his work, and his writings diverge from reality and this divergence calls for repudiation. The repudiation that I will offer in this section is long overdue, since Romano’s obituary was met with relatively little response at the time of its publication. Apart from some commentary that accompanied a special\nmemorial issue of the *International Journal of Baudrillard Studies*, there has been no cogent attempt to rectify Romano’s offensive representation. From a conventional rhetorical perspective, Romano’s obituary damages Baudrillard’s reputation and deprecates his value as a theorist, especially for individuals who have not previously encountered Baudrillardian theory. Supporting Baudrillard necessarily entails a repudiation of Romano’s obituary.\n\nNotably, one of the few responses to Romano’s obituary of Baudrillard avoids a direct engagement with the representation of Baudrillard forwarded by Romano. Instead, this response—an editorial written by Gerry Coulter close to five months after Baudrillard’s death—questions Romano’s own credibility as a rhetor. In this response, Coulter mobilizes the strategy that Romano used in the obituary of Baudrillard, and turns that strategy against Romano; he attacks the reliability of Romano’s writing by attacking Romano’s credibility. For example, Coulter addresses Romano as one of two writers “who lined up to urinate on Baudrillard’s grave but only managed to pee on their own shoes” (“Jean”). Coulter suggests that Romano’s attempt to disparage Baudrillard backfired and actually damaged Romano’s own credibility. In Romano, Coulter finds a writer “into whom Baudrillard’s negativity has passed, but not his sense of humor” (“Jean”). Thus, Coulter questions Romano’s characterization of Baudrillard by characterizing Romano as a vengeful pessimist. He assails Romano’s ethos in order to preserve Baudrillard’s ethos, guessing that the negative obituary might have resulted from Romano’s disappointment that Baudrillard “may be more widely studied today than\n\n---\n\n59 Silence, of course, is a response in and of itself.\nThis suggestion implies that Romano’s negative obituary of Baudrillard emanated from a highly morose, potentially jealous, grudge. Indeed, prior to writing Baudrillard’s obituary, Romano published disparaging remarks about Baudrillard. Rather than repudiating the representation of Baudrillard offered by Romano, Coulter chooses to engage Romano’s obituary of Baudrillard by criticizing Romano’s own ethos.\n\nDespite Coulter’s decision to respond to Romano’s obituary by reproaching Romano’s ethos, much ground exists upon which Romano’s obituary can be repudiated for its actual portrayal of Baudrillard. For instance, Romano claims that Baudrillard worked “under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu.” While Baudrillard was, in fact, closely associated with Lefebvre and Barthes, especially so between 1966 and 1968, Baudrillard did not work “under the tutelage” of Bourdieu. On the contrary, the two were contemporaries. Indeed, Baudrillard challenged many of Bourdieu’s thoughts, so much so that the pair might best be described as rivals (Baudrillard Live 1). More remains at stake here than a factual inaccuracy, as it discloses the degree to which Romano misrepresents Baudrillard. Romano’s inadequate understanding of Baudrillard’s relationship to his contemporaries allows Romano to, first, vaguely lump Baudrillard with “intentionally obscure French philosoph[ers],” and, second, suggest that Baudrillard was the “screw-up who endangered the brand.” When\n\n---\n\n60 A conventional analysis of this obituary recognizes that even in academic circles—circles not only familiar with the Chronicle, but circles that are energized by disputes over knowledge—the occasion of death seems to call for a putting aside of disputes. Thus, Baudrillard’s death should not be considered an occasion for Romano to renew a war against the poststructuralist thinker he most despises. Nor should Baudrillard’s death be seen as an occasion to critically compare Baudrillard to Troyat—the same argument holds for Troyat, too. Instead, the occasion of death should commemorate an accomplished life recently passed.\n\n61 For example, Romano’s particular aversion to Baudrillard is captured in a 2003 article where Romano calls Baudrillard “the Eurotrash patron saint” (“An Oasis”).\nflaws in Romano’s understanding of Baudrillard are exposed, the conclusions that follow from this portrayal are shown to be erroneous. Contrary to Romano’s depiction of Baudrillard as typical of, or an insider to, some academic brand, he was, according to Mike Gane, “an outsider” (1). Gane notes that Baudrillard was increasingly excluded from influential academic sectors, especially after he published his critique of Michel Foucault in 1977 (1). Indeed, Foucault, as editor of *Critique*, was among those individuals who censured Baudrillard. Hardly typical of the brand Romano comments upon—“French” thinkers whom “no one dares” to shut up—Baudrillard seemed to be shut up much more often. Thus, the portrayal of him as an excluded outsider not typical of any brand challenges Romano’s depiction of Baudrillard as “the screw-up who endangered the brand.” Baudrillard could not hyperbolically embody a brand from which he was excluded and censured.\n\nRomano’s obituary can be further repudiated for the way in which it cites other scholars in order to disparage Baudrillard. Often, Romano’s claims depend upon evidence he gathers from sources, yet Romano twists source information in order to misrepresent Baudrillard. For example, consider Romano’s citation of Mark Poster’s 2001 book, *Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd ed.* To support his claim that Baudrillard’s writing is incomprehensible, Romano positions Poster as “one of Baudrillard’s shepherds in the U.S.” and then references Poster’s criticism of Baudrillard’s writing. Romano tells obituary readers:\n\n> In his writings until the mid 1980s, Poster observes, Baudrillard “fails to define his major terms… his writing style is hyperbolic, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to\nqualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered… He ignores contradictory evidence.”\n\nWhile Poster undeniably takes issue with aspects of Baudrillard’s writing, Poster’s claim is qualified, in that it only characterizes Baudrillard’s writing until the mid 1980s. That is to say that Poster’s remarks apply less to Baudrillard’s later work. Indeed, Baudrillard’s 2000 Passwords, actually moves toward defining his major terms by glossing twelve concepts central to his thought. However, Romano fails to make this qualification clear because his reference interrupts the qualifier “In his writings until the mid 1980s” (which is supposed to modify “Baudrillard”) with the attribution “Poster observes.” By separating the qualifier from the claim, Romano suggests that the Poster’s claim can stand alone, unqualified. The qualification risks being lost on the obituary reader, especially those who are exhausted by this long, heavily edited citation. Accordingly, Romano risks misrepresenting Baudrillard’s writing.\n\nRomano’s obituary can most substantively be repudiated for the way in which it imposes a conventional value system upon representations of Baudrillard, its own and others. Because Romano’s obituary was published over two weeks after Baudrillard’s death, Romano read, referenced, and assembled other earlier obituaries of Baudrillard to describe the conventional values of the academy. Romano’s obituary represents Baudrillard as departing from these values. Romano observes that “the words that festooned French and English-language reports—celebrated, provocative, controversial—were not accompanied by convincing, persuasive, groundbreaking or other words a thinker might prefer.” Here, Romano attempts to construct preference by imposing a\nvalue system upon depictions of Baudrillard. According to Romano, other thinkers who are depicted as “convincing,” “persuasive,” and “groundbreaking” ought to be preferred to Baudrillard. Thus, Romano draws upon an understanding of rhetoric as representation in order to portray Baudrillard as “celebrated,” “provocative,” and “controversial,” only to evaluate these same representations using terms, such as “persuasive” and “convincing,” which belong to a highly traditional understanding of rhetoric as persuasion. Put differently, Romano judges the portrayal of a thinker according to that thinker’s persuasiveness and, in doing so, discloses his rhetorical value system. The rebuttal to Romano’s value system is rather straightforward: This might be one particular construction of value rooted in certain understandings of rhetoric, but value and rhetoric can both be constructed and evaluated alternatively. Baudrillard’s rhetorical method offers one such alternative.\n\nAn Alternative Analysis of Romano’s Obituary of Baudrillard\n\nIn this second phase of analysis, I will offer an alternative evaluation of Romano’s obituary by evaluating it in accordance with Baudrillard’s own rhetorical method: exchange. In doing so, I implicitly argue for Baudrillard’s significance to rhetoric by demonstrating how Baudrillard’s unconventional approach to rhetoric actually sanctions Romano’s obituary.\n\nAs I have argued in the previous chapters, Baudrillard’s rhetorical method is exchange. Through his rhetoric, Baudrillard methodically works to exchange one meaning with another meaning. He challenges the meaning of life by deploying what he calls fatal strategies. Fatal strategies are a specific manifestation of exchange that position\ndeath as disappearance and deploy death in order to challenge life. Baudrillard deploys fatal strategies in order to initiate exchange between life and death. Baudrillard’s writing has long argued against modern society’s preference for and valuing of life over death. As he sees it, the monopoly that life holds over death in contemporary society corresponds to the value society places on the laboring body, the producer of capital. In such a society, he explains that people “are compelled to fight for a place in the circuit of work and of productivity” (Mirror 132). In “Political Economy and Death,” his most extensive treatment of life and death, Baudrillard contends that modern society has excluded the dead from exchange: the dead “are thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation” (Symbolic 126). Society prohibits the exchange of the dead; the dead are, in other words, rhetorically constrained. According to Baudrillard, the only exchange of the dead that society permits is ritualized mourning, a kind of pseudo-exchange that he detests (134). Mourning merely laments the loss of the vital, productive body. In place of mourning, he suggests a “rewriting” of death, in which life and death are exchanged in a duel. Here, he invokes the word “rewriting” to emphasize the significant reconceptualization that is needed to fully appreciate his rhetorical method. Like the two-sided game, the duel constitutes a central metaphor that he uses to describe exchange. Thus, “rewriting” death involves conceptualizing life and death as a two-sided game and endorsing a circular movement between the two sides. His description of the relationship between life and death is analogous to his explication of writing. On the side of “appearance” is life and on the side of “disappearance” is death. Baudrillard positions the two sides as components of one complete symbolic act. He emphasizes that life (the vital) and death (the fatal) together “constitute one symbolic act (the symbolic act par\nexcellence)” (166). In a society that excludes death on account of life and privileges the vital over the fatal, a whole symbolic act can only be realized through Baudrillard’s rhetorical method.\n\nFatal strategies are moves that a rhetor methodically deploys in order to initiate exchange. By ascribing to a conception of rhetoric that defines rhetorical success in terms of exchange and not representation, fatal strategies suggest a different rhetorical approach to obituary writing which champions disappearance and death. Viewed in terms of Baudrillardian rhetoric, Romano’s obituary can be interpreted as mobilizing fatal strategies. In fact, the fatal strategies in Romano’s obituary are so unconventional that Baudrillard might well have sanctioned this disparaging treatment himself.\n\nAn interpretation of Romano’s obituary in accordance with Baudrillard’s notion of fatal strategies sanctions the unflattering forecast forwarded at the conclusion of the obituary. Although Romano’s assertion that “No one will read Baudrillard in 50 years” seems over harshly and extremely nasty to Baudrillard’s supporters, it poses a strong challenge to Baudrillard’s meaning or his critical value. Romano’s obituary might be parsed as follows: Baudrillard appeared as a brand, an effect of a cultural milieu that valued obscure French theorists, and Baudrillard will disappear in the next fifty years. While a conventional analysis might object to such a brazen statement, an unconventional interpretation of this statement might sanction it, for Romano uses his writing to regulate Baudrillard’s disappearance. Romano seems to welcome the eradication of Baudrillard and his thought, preferring that Baudrillard be forgotten and Troyat be remembered. Thus, Romano’s obituary champions disappearance and simultaneously offends convention. The challenge Romano’s obituary presents to Baudrillard’s critical value is\nconsiderable, but, as Baudrillardian exchange holds, it is a necessary challenge.\n\nIronically, Romano writes as a Baudrillardian rhetor in his obituary disparaging Baudrillard.\n\nII. Kandell’s Unconventional Obituary of Derrida\n\nRomano’s obituary of Baudrillard is, however, one case among many that call for a renewed attention to rhetorical method among various audiences inside and outside of the academy. To suggest the wider scope of my argument and to further position rhetorical method as important to rhetoric as ethos, I turn now to another unconventional obituary: Jonathan Kandell’s 2004 New York Times obituary of Jacques Derrida.\n\nOn October 10, 2004, the New York Times printed an obituary on the occasion of the death of the seventy-four year-old Jacques Derrida. The obituary, entitled “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74,” rather negatively portrayed Derrida, his work, and his writing.62 This particular obituary was so unflattering that many of Derrida’s supporters—including Judith Butler, Susan C. Jarratt, Steven Mailloux, Joan W. Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Samuel Weber, and Kenneth Reinhard—responded to it by writing open letters of disapproval to the New York Times. The Times published some of these letters, and all of the letters are currently archived on the website Remembering Jacques Derrida,63 maintained by the University of California at Irvine.\n\n62 Upon comparison, the criticism of Derrida forwarded in Kandell’s obituary seems much more muted than the criticism of Baudrillard in Romano’s obituary. That is to say that a comparison of the two obituaries shows that Romano’s obituary of Baudrillard is the most extreme; Baudrillard’s ethos is more severely treated. The suggestion is that, when compared to Derrida, Baudrillard is the least authoritative scholar, the least reputable thinker, and the least persuasive rhetor.\n\nIn this obituary, Jonathan Kandell assails Derrida’s character by representing Derrida as a rebellious, opportunistic, and irresolute thinker. According to Kandell, Derrida “was the personification of a French school of thinking [which many Americans] felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education.” Kandell further explains that, as “the personification” of deconstruction, Derrida “was the target of as much anger as admiration.” Kandell observes that, while some individuals saw Derrida as undermining tradition, some students considered Derrida and deconstruction “a rite of passage” and a good number of younger professors latched onto him and his thoughts as a “springboard” to earn tenure. Kandell also describes Derrida as “an indifferent student” and an academic entrepreneur who “was paid hefty fees to lecture a few weeks every year.” Most noticeable in his attack of Derrida’s ethos, however, is Kandell’s discussion of Derrida’s association with Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger. Kandell spends nearly one fifth of the obituary recounting how “Mr. Derrida’s credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de Man.” Kandell notes that Derrida was Jewish, before he details the ways in which some individuals perceived Derrida—as “irresolute” towards and “condoning” of de Man’s anti-Semitism as well as Heidegger’s fascist ideas—during this supposed “scandal.” Kandell’s recapitulation of this scandal seems to position Derrida as a hypocritical figure, void of the moral gumption that allows an individual to maintain firm opinions on particular issues. Kandell’s obituary rarely represents Derrida positively. Even Kandell’s acknowledgment that Derrida “cut a dashing, handsome figure at the lectern, with his thick thatch of prematurely white hair, tanned complexion, and well-tailored suits,” can be considered disparaging as Kandell largely dismisses this handsome figure’s intellectual work.\\(^{64}\\)\n\n\\(^{64}\\) On account of his appearance, Derrida was often called the “Silver Fox.”\nThese unflattering representations of Derrida’s character stem from equally unsavory portrayals of his work and his writing. Kandell’s attack on Derrida’s ethos is multi-pronged; the obituary questions Derrida’s character, as well as his authority as a thinker and a writer. Kandell refers to Derrida as “one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers,” and by representing Derrida’s writing as perplexing, Kandell supports his characterization of Derrida as abstruse. Besides describing Derrida’s writing as “turgid and baffling,” Kandell contends that Derrida’s writing typically possesses “murky explanations.” Kandell’s obituary emphasizes the features of Derrida’s writing that prohibit certain audiences from engaging with it. For example, Kandell claims that Derrida’s writing “could be off-putting to the uninitiated.” Kandell further notes that Derrida’s writing on deconstruction lacked a precise definition, which Kandell attributes to Derrida’s unwillingness or inability to offer such a definition. These unsavory descriptions of Derrida’s writing continue, as Kandell observes that “a single sentence could run for three pages, and a footnote even longer.” In addition to these descriptions, Kandell quotes a 1992 Economist editorial which states: “The trouble with reading Mr. Derrida is that there is too much perspiration for too little inspiration.” Here, the suggestion is that Derrida’s writing is not worth a reader’s time, and it is a suggestion that Kandell arranges in order to malign Derrida’s writing and his reputation.\n\nKandell’s obituary memorializes Derrida as a thinker whose thoughts declined before his body; his representation of Derrida, his work, and his writing, imply that Derrida’s ideas had been buried in the grave of public opinion some fifteen years before his death. For instance, Kandell asserts that “By the late 1980's, Mr. Derrida's intellectual star was on the wane on both sides of the Atlantic.” Here, Kandell offers an assessment of\nDerrida’s legacy in a manner that resembles Romano’s assertion that “No one will read Baudrillard in fifty years.” Whereas Romano’s statement forecasts that Baudrillard will eventually fall out of favor, Kandell suggests that Derrida has already fallen out of favor.\n\nThe argument forwarded by Kandell’s obituary clearly departs from the conventional obituary by offering an unambiguously negative representation of Derrida. Kandell’s obituary argues that Derrida and his work are of little value, and Kandell supports this argument by characterizing Derrida as rebellious, opportunistic, irresolute, and abstruse. Like Romano’s argument about Baudrillard’s value, Kandell’s argument about Derrida’s value relies upon depictions of Derrida which can be contested through alternative interpretations. That is to say, alternative interpretations can be mobilized to repudiate Kandell’s representation of Derrida and undermine his claims about Derrida’s value. Such rebuttals adhere to a traditional understanding of rhetoric, in that they are premised upon the notion that rhetoric and writing are representational. They also attempt to resuscitate a thinker’s ethos, since, according to this understanding, an appeal based upon character is a rhetorician’s most significant appeal. While Romano’s obituary of Baudrillard was met with relatively little response, Kandell’s obituary of Derrida was quite publicly repudiated by Derrida’s supporters who interpreted Derrida much differently than Kandell. As such, the first phase of my analysis will argue for Derrida’s value by analyzing the rebuttals offered by Derrida’s supporters.\n\nA Conventional Analysis of Kandell’s Obituary of Derrida\n\n---\n\n65 Kandell’s obituary elicits an emotional response from readers much more than Romano’s obituary. Derrida’s supporters express dismay, disbelief, surprise, distress, even outrage at the commentary proffered as commemoration in the Times (Gelley; Hollier; Engle; Atkinson et al). Admittedly, the difference between the two publications the Chronicle and the Times, might have contributed to the number and kind of responses that each obituary received.\nThe responses forwarded by Derrida’s supporters resoundingly embody the conventional understanding that rhetoric and writing represent reality. That is to say, Derrida’s supporters mobilize convention in order to repudiate Kandell’s claims about Derrida. From a conventional rhetorical perspective, Kandell’s obituary damages Derrida’s reputation and deprecates his value as a theorist. As many of Derrida’s supporters recognized, Kandell’s representation of Derrida diverges from reality and this divergence calls for repudiation. Supporters counter the obituary’s claims both indirectly, by attacking the ethos of the obituary’s producers, and directly, by forwarding alternative representations of Derrida.\n\nDerrida’s supporters resoundingly invoke conventional rhetoric and obituary writing in order to contest Kandell’s claims. For his supporters, Derrida’s death called for the “‘default’ model” obituary; it was an occasion for a neutral, if not positive, memorial that worked to accurately represent Derrida’s life and accomplishments. Indeed, many supporters castigate Kandell for defying occasion, straying from convention, and representing reality subjectively. “It is too late for anything but regrets at an occasion missed to rise above the petty controversy to honor the life and achievements of a remarkable man,” write the faculty, students, and staff of the University of California at Irvine (Atkinson et al.17). Similarly, Judith Butler views Kandell’s obituary as besieging “the occasion of this accomplished philosopher’s death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time.” Like the writers from the University of California at Irvine, Butler invokes a conventional understanding of rhetoric and obituary writing by expecting accolades in an obituary, not “vitriolic” commentary (Butler). Supporters also refer to custom and propriety, as they categorize Kandell’s obituary as unconventional. For\nexample, Lars Engle opines, “When a major intellectual dies, it is surely not customary for the *Times* to assign his obituary to a small-minded partisan who will devote himself to denigration rather than explanation.” Moreover, Elizabeth Weed was troubled by Kandell’s obituary, since it was not “a knowledgeable and objective consideration of [Derrida].” Yve-Alain Bois also recognizes that this obituary was untraditional, since Derrida was “supposed to be memorialized.” Joan Scott joins Bois in mentioning the newspaper’s propensity to print distasteful obituaries which deviate from the occasion. Scott comments upon the occasion, convention, and objectivity of the obituary, stating “A slash and burn approach might have been appropriate for Carmine de Sapio (whose obituary [Kandell] also wrote), but not for Jacques Derrida.”\n\nThe subjective, inaccurate rhetorical approach that Scott references as “a slash and burn approach” receives similar characterization throughout the responses to Kandell’s obituary. As the faculty, students, and staff of the University of California at Irvine note, the obituary “feels like an insult” and contains “errors, half-truths, and slurs.” Other letter writers refer to Kandell’s writing as “mean-spirited and uninformed,” “ungracious and ill-informed,” “terribly one-sided,” “an anti-intellectual rant,” and “a biased and inaccurate account” (Weber and Reinhard; Engle; Scott; Scott; Scott). These comments all address Kandell’s deviation from conventional rhetoric and writing. Instead of crafting a neutral memorial that worked to accurately represent Derrida’s life and accomplishments, Kandell’s obituary offers a negative interpretation of Derrida’s life. As Scott notes, Kandell’s obituary “is full of innuendo and nasty asides.” Likewise, after expressing dismay over “the crude, even slanderous, tone of the obituary,” Alexander Gelley calls Kandell’s obituary “a slur” and “a gossipy essay.” Spivak calls the treatment\n“scurrilous,” and Suzanne Guerlac recognizes the obituary’s “shallowness.” These comments show Derrida’s supporters conceiving of obituary writing in accordance with a conventional rhetorical framework. They also suggest that the alternative interpretations offered by the supporters will likewise adhere to conventional notions of rhetoric as representing reality and obituary writing as positively memorializing an individual’s life.\n\nDerrida’s supporters repudiate his representation in the obituary by attacking the ethos of Jonathan Kandell and the New York Times. While this strategy fails to directly engage particular representations of Derrida, it works against the obituary’s argument by casting doubt upon the character and credibility of those who produced it. For instance, Bois categorizes the Kandell obituary as typical of the ill-reputed Times. Bois opens his letter with this statement:\n\nTopping the usually Philistine relationship of the Times to just about everything academic, and it habit of entrusting the composition of obituaries to overt opponents of the deceased supposed to be memorialized, the article by Jonathan Kandell on Jacques Derrida, who died this past Friday, reaches a peak of populist anti-intellectualism—not to speak of the countless distortions it contains—that I thought only possible in a Murdoch publication.\n\nBois’s statement links credibility with accuracy, in that it associates a bad reputation with bad reporting. Additionally, Scott questions the degree to which both the newspaper and the reporter should be trusted: “One wonders what has become of your standards of journalism, hiring a free-lance writer of dubious reputation to write an obituary of Jacques Derrida, one of the renowned philosophers of our time.” More to the point, Scott notes that Kandell’s writings (which include a Times obituary of Lawrence Tisch) have\nbeen reviewed poorly, before offering the assessment that “Kandell is embarrassingly illiterate in the history of philosophy.” As Scott’s comments show, this response challenges the obituary writer’s representation of the deceased by challenging the obituary writer’s ethos.\n\nMore directly, Derrida’s supporters repudiate Kandell’s obituary for the way in which it assembles quotations and other references to disparage Derrida. For instance, while discussing Derrida’s response to the de Man scandal, Kandell quotes a 1992 comment from The Guardian’s Peter Lennon: “‘Borrowing Derrida's logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-Semitism.’” One of Derrida’s supporters, Denis Hollier, aggressively counters Kandell’s use of this comment. Hollier considers the manner in which Kandell represents Derrida to be “ridiculous.” Hollier states: “Absurdity here is competing with dishonest, since [Kandell] cowardly hides behind a quotation from The Guardian in order not to be held personally responsible for his slanderous insinuation.” Viewing Kandell’s use of The Guardian quote as a dishonest representation, Hollier argues against Kandell’s portrayal of Derrida as irresolute. Like Hollier, other supporters take issue with the way Kandell assembles references to represent Derrida. Many of these supporters repudiate Kandell on more general terms than Hollier. For example, Elizabeth Weed refers to Kandell’s commentary as “most clichéd,” and Stephen Melville argues that Kandell’s obituary settles “for merely recycling a farrago of misconceptions.” Gelley, for his part, describes Kandell as guilelessly parroting animosity towards Derrida.\nSupporters offer their most substantive rebuttal to Kandell’s obituary, when they respond to its central claim—that Derrida, his work, and his writing are abstruse. Supporters repudiate this claim by revealing the assumptions that undergird Kandell’s evaluation. For example, Weber and Reinhard object to the criteria that Kandell used to evaluate abstruseness. They write, “To characterize Derrida, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, as an ‘Abstruse Theorist’ is to employ criteria which would disqualify Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Heisenberg.” For Weber and Reinhard, Kandell’s characterization of Derrida as “abstruse” is implausible. Similarly, Bois refers to the obituary’s title as indicative of the “hatchet job” written by Kandell. As Bois notes, the obituary “is full of filth,” namely commentary in which Kandell offers “caricatural” descriptions and “spouts” derogatory terms.\n\nThe strongest repudiation of Kandell’s assertion that Derrida was an abstruse theorist comes from Mark C. Taylor. Following the responses to Kandell’s obituary of Derrida in the Times, Taylor wrote an opinion-editorial. This opinion-editorial served as alternative obituary and was published in the Times on October 14, 2004. Taylor’s obituary, entitled “What Derrida Really Meant,” unambiguously aims to counter Kandell’s representation of Derrida. Taylor seems to recognize that Kandell’s characterization of Derrida as abstruse depends upon the notion that Derrida’s writing is obscure. Accordingly, Taylor addresses this claim in the second paragraph of his\n\n---\n\n66 Derrida’s supporters decry many of Kandell’s other claims. For example, supporters object to the claim that Derrida “was the personification of a French school of thinking that [many Americans] felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical educational” (Kandell). As Weber and Reinhard put it, this personification possesses “scarcely concealed xenophobia.” Also, supporters repudiate the suggestion that Derrida was opportunistic. Derrida’s colleagues at the University of California at Irvine deployed knowledge of Derrida’s academic appointment at their institution in order to refute Kandell’s implication that Derrida “was an operator who did not give [University of California at Irvine] full bang for our buck.”\n\nobituary. Admitting that Derrida’s writings “cannot be easily summarized or reduced to one-liners,” Taylor argues that Derrida has been misunderstood. Of Derrida, Taylor writes:\n\nThe obscurity of his writing, however, does not conceal a code that can be cracked, but reflects the density and complexity characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature and art. Like good French wine, his works age well. The more one lingers with them, the more they reveal about our world and ourselves.\n\nIn effect, Taylor is reevaluating abstruseness in this passage. Taylor engages Derrida’s writing from a perspective that values density and complexity. In doing so, he turns the very criteria which Kandell used to evaluate Derrida’s writing negatively into markers of positive qualities.\n\nThus, Taylor’s alternative obituary argues for a different interpretation of Derrida, albeit within a conventional understanding of rhetoric as representing reality. That is to say that both Taylor and Kandell seem to agree that rhetoric works to represent reality and they both seem to agree that Derrida’s writing is difficult. Where they disagree, however, is in their characterization and evaluation of Derrida’s writing and Derrida.\n\nWhile Kandell judges both to be abstruse and depicts Derrida and his writing negatively, Taylor judges both to be of high quality and depicts them positively. In both of these arguments, Derrida’s ethos—his character, authority, credibility, and reputation—is positioned as the most significant adjudicating factor. If an audience believes that Derrida is credible, reputable, authoritative, and of sound character, it will consider his difficult writing to be of high quality and accept the argument in Taylor’s obituary. If an audience doubts that Derrida is credible, reputable, authoritative, and of sound character, it will\nconsider his difficult writing to be abstruse and accept the argument in Kandell’s obituary. However, when rhetoric is understood as beyond representation, then Derrida’s rhetorical method becomes as important to rhetoric as ethos, and arguments come to be accepted on different terms.\n\nAn Alternative Analysis of Kandell’s Obituary of Derrida\n\nIn this second phase of analysis, I will offer an alternative interpretation of Kandell’s obituary by evaluating it in accordance with Derrida’s rhetorical method of espacement, a method that embraces rhetoric’s unbridled citationality and understands writing as marking absence. In doing so, I depart from the arguments offered by Derrida’s supporters in their open letters to the Times, for these letters endorse the very understanding of rhetoric and writing that Derrida’s rhetorical method seems to contest. In an ironically un-Derridian way, the letters attempt to bridle the citationality of Kandell’s obituary by appealing to context and focusing on presence. This phase of my analysis, however, deploys Derrida’s concept of différance, disregards context, and focuses on absence in order to demonstrate the way in which Derrida’s unconventional approach to rhetoric actually sanctions Kandell’s obituary.\n\nDerrida’s notion of différance is foundational to his rhetorical method. Différance, for Derrida, emerges out of the relationship between writing and context. In “Signature, Event, Context,” Derrida attempts to show, first, that the concept of context is inadequate and, second, that writing should not be primarily understood as communication, representation, or expression (1476-7). Instead, Derrida argues that writing should be considered in terms of its unchecked citationality; he wants us to consider writing in\n\n---\n\n67 Derridian espacement involves other key concepts, including trace and rupture.\nterms of absence, or what he terms *différance*. He contrasts the notion of absence in writing (*différance*) with the notion of presence in writing. Implying that occasion is so wholly contextual and contingent that it cannot be captured, preserved, or reproduced through writing, Derrida claims that writing, which emerges from a particular event (a specific “present”), marks only the absence of that event (a present that has since passed).\n\nWhen analyzed in terms of Derridian *différance*, Kandell’s obituary treats Derrida in a way that compels readers to acknowledge the absent counterpart to conventional understandings of writing as presence. Kandell’s obituary emphasizes the way in which writing marks absence, namely Derrida’s absence. In Kandell’s obituary, the paradoxical relationship between presence and absence becomes apparent. Conventional approaches to obituaries endorse an objective representation; they favor the presence of the deceased over the absence of the obituary writer. Ostensibly, the open letters to the *Times* adhere to this approach, for they argue that Kandell ought to have kept himself (or his writerly presence) out of (or absent from) the *Times*’ obituary.\n\nThe approach suggested by Derrida, however, remains attuned to the absence of the deceased and the life that has since passed. This alternative interpretation seemingly sanctions Kandell’s presence in the obituary, for his grossly subjective assessment of Derrida’s life makes Derrida’s absence all the more profound. Indeed, Derrida’s absence pervades Kandell’s representation of him from the first line of the obituary: “Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office announced” (Kandell). Here, Kandell’s\ncommunication of Derrida’s passing discloses the contingency of rhetoric. Kandell’s presence in the obituary supports the concept of *différance*.\n\nKandell’s (mis)representation of Derrida evidences the rhetorical drift that occurs in conjunction with an absence, when a presence has passed. It corroborates Derrida’s approach to representations as marked by absences. Kandell’s presence in the obituary makes Derrida’s absence more acute, more pointed, and, for Derrida’s his personal associates, more painful. For instance, Spivak’s letter to the *Times* closes by noting that Kandell’s obituary is all the more offensive, since the obituary’s “subject is unable to respond.” Spivak’s comment implies that there is a relationship between the absence of Derrida and the presence of Kandell (and, by proxy, the *New York Times*) in the obituary; that absence marks presence. Alexander Gelley, one of Derrida’s colleagues from the University of California at Irvine, substantiates this point in his letter to the *Times*. Gelley laments Derrida’s absence by closing his letter with the short line that reads: “He will be missed.”\n\nObituary Writing\n\nThis chapter has argued that critics inside and outside of the academy should consider rhetorical method as important to rhetoric as ethos. To support this contention, I analyzed the obituaries of two poststructuralist theorists, first, in accordance with a traditional understanding of rhetoric and, second, in accordance with each theorist’s rhetorical method. My analysis of each obituary demonstrated the significance of the Baudrillardian exchange and Derridian *différance* to rhetorical criticism. Although these\nanalyses invite comparison, they also predispose themselves to rhetorical criticism. In this section, I outline the criteria that critics can use to evaluate obituaries in accordance with three models of obituary writing: (1) the default model; (2) the Baudrillardian model; and, (3) the Derridian model. Although I will not be developing this connection, these three models roughly approximate the four phases of representation outlined by Baudrillard in “The Precession of Simulacra,” with phases one and two (the good representation and the evil representation) corresponding to the default model, phase three (disimulation) corresponding to the Derridian model, and phase four (simulation) corresponding to the Baudrillardian model.\n\nThe “default” model obituary corresponds to conventional understandings of representation, in which a text accurately reflects reality. The default obituary honors the deceased through an objective recollection of their lives. A conventional obituary would therefore be assessed favorably, if it were deemed “true to life.” As the conventional obituary drifts towards a more subjective approach, either positive or negative, the obituary risks being assessed unfavorably, as inaccurate, or not “true to life.” Regardless of whether it is evaluated as favorable or unfavorable, flattering or unflattering, nasty or nice, the conventional obituary is evaluated with respect to a principle of reality. In other words, a real referent can be consulted as a basis for a value\n\n---\n\n68 Romano’s obituary of Baudrillard and Kandell’s obituary of Derrida invite comparison, and such a comparison asks that rhetorical critics question existing valuations of rhetorical theorists and their theories. A conventional comparison of Romano’s obituary of Baudrillard and Kandell’s obituary of Derrida suggests that the incomprehensible clown is less reputable in his work and writing than the abstruse theorist. That is to say that, upon comparison, Baudrillard’s obituary is the more extreme than Derrida’s obituary, and that his ethos is more severely treated than Derrida’s ethos. The implication is that, when compared to Derrida, Baudrillard is the least authoritative scholar, the least reputable thinker, and the least persuasive rhetor; that Derrida, his work, and his writings enjoy a better stature.\n\n69 Baudrillard identifies this phase as what we would call a good appearance.\n\n70 In the second phase, the representation masks a reality, or pretends as if reality did not exist. Referencing this phase as an evil appearance, Baudrillard calls this phase “dissimulation.”\njudgment. However, critics must recognize that this model’s reliance upon the reality of a referent produces an impossible critical task. Whether it is ultimately judged to be good or bad, the default obituary refers to a life that has already passed, yet the life that is the referent no longer exists. In other words, any objective evaluation in which the representation is compared to the referent is impossible. Critics must recognize that no obituaries that adhere to the “‘default’ model” can be considered to be good (as in realistic); rather, all obituaries that adhere to this model are bad obituaries, with some being worse than others, since evaluating an objective, realistic representation is an impossible rhetorical feat.\n\nThe Baudrillardian model of obituary writing ascribes to Baudrillard’s notion of exchange and therefore must be evaluated in accordance with the obituary’s ability to initiate movement between appearance and disappearance. Significantly, this model does not maintain a definite distinction between reality and representation. Instead, this obituary’s main purpose is to regulate the game of exchange between appearance and disappearance, and avoid a take-over by either side. Since the Baudrillardian obituary strives for a radical rupture of values, no single set of unconditional evaluative criteria exist for this model of obituary writing. Critics who assess a Baudrillardian obituary need to consider the way in which an obituary maintains exchange. Although the criteria for evaluation are contingent upon the ways in which meaning has been made or challenged in the past, three critical judgments are possible. First, an obituary would be judged to deficient in initiating exchange if it plays only one side of the two-sided game, if it overwhelmingly works in appearance or deals in disappearance. For an example of the deficient obituary that works overwhelmingly in appearance, I need only note Romano’s\ngloss of other obituaries of Baudrillard. In this example, the meaning Romano makes by reproducing other obituaries becomes banal. The corollary to the obituary that overwhelmingly works in appearance is the similarly deficient obituary that deals in disappearance. Such an obituary would mean nothing—it would be completely incomprehensible. Second, an obituary would be judged favorably if it initiated exchange by challenging convention. This favorable Baudrillardian obituary would execute the sophistic move of making the weaker argument seem the greater argument in order to sustain exchange. Here, Baudrillard’s deployment of fatal strategies in order to initiate exchange between the vital and the fatal serves as an example. Admittedly, if the fatal was monopolizing the game, one would expect Baudrillard to have deployed moves known as vital strategies so as to initiate exchange. Third, a Baudrillardian obituary would be judged favorably if it wallowed in ambiguity and sustained ambivalence through devices such as rhetorical questions.\n\nThe Derridian model of obituary writing corresponds to Derrida’s concept of differance. It considers writing to be marked by absence, as all representation is insufficient to a degree. Since it acknowledges the insufficiency of representation and focuses on the absence of a real referent, this model of obituary writing is well suited for the representation of a life that has passed. This model maintains the distinction between reality and representation and therefore resides somewhere in between the default model and the Baudrillardian model. Critics who evaluate a Derridian obituary ought to pay particular attention to the degree to which the writing is marked with absence. Under this model, a favorable obituary would be replete with markers that signal to readers that no referent exists. As Kandell’s obituary illustrates, these markers might include an intrusive\npresence that makes the absence more profound. In other words, the favorable obituary would be overt in its treatment of an absent referent. On the contrary, an unfavorable Derridian obituary would attempt to hide absence through representation and minimize the markers in the text. This kind of unfavorable obituary would recall an individual’s life as if the individual would recall it himself, or herself. Critics must recognize that the obituaries which ascribe to this model will always be marked in some way; they will never completely succeed in masking the absent referent with a representation.\n\nHaving outlined the alternative models of obituary writing suggested by Baudrillard and Derrida, as well as the evaluative criteria that rhetorical critics can deploy to assess each model, I conclude this chapter by returning to the obituary’s frequent categorization as epideictic rhetoric. In the following section, I argue that the specific contributions of Baudrillard and Derrida to epideictic rhetoric call for a significant shift in the way rhetoric scholars conceive of poststructuralist contributions to epideictic rhetoric.\n\nPoststructuralist Epideictic Rhetoric\n\nIn the writings of both Derrida and Baudrillard, rhetorical scholars find a poststructuralist repositioning of epideictic rhetoric that elevates this often-denigrated category of rhetoric by fundamentally reconceiving of this genre. Since Aristotle, epideictic rhetoric has been classified as one of three classical genres of rhetoric. It occupies a place alongside, and by some accounts subordinate to, deliberative rhetoric and forensic rhetoric. Epideictic rhetoric offers praise or blame, and has long been connected to ceremonial occasions, including eulogies. Some rhetoricians argue that,\nbecause of its ceremonial nature, epideictic rhetoric is not as vital to the functioning of society and, thus, not as important as its other two generic counterparts: forensic rhetoric or deliberative rhetoric. Whereas forensic rhetoric enabled the functioning of the Greek courts and deliberative rhetoric facilitated the functioning of the body politic, epideictic rhetoric was denigrated as not vital to the functioning of society. Thus, it has long weathered charges that it is the least significant of the three classical genres of rhetoric.\\(^{71}\\)\n\nWhat significance epideictic rhetoric does retain comes from its association with value systems and timing. As Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard notes, “value rather than reason has long been seen as the special province of epideictic rhetoric,” and epideictic rhetoric is often conceived of as rhetoric that seizes an occasion to develop, defend, or challenge value systems (766).\\(^{72}\\) That is to say that contemporary rhetoric scholars now understand the province of epideictic rhetoric as exceeding the praise or blame paradigm. For example, Sheard notes that, besides “discourse that praises and censors,” epideictic rhetoric encompasses discourse that “grapples with the competing values and value systems to which speakers and writers appeal when they wish to laud or criticize a culture’s or community’s ideas or behaviors” (787). In these remarks, Sheard clearly affords epideictic rhetoric a more prolific place in society, yet they maintain a connection between epideictic rhetoric and timing. As Sheard notes, the efficacy of epideictic rhetoric “depends today as much as it did in antiquity on \\textit{kairos} or ‘exigency’ in the broadest sense (not just the ‘occasion’ of discourse, but what makes the occasion what it is—the critical convergence of time, place, circumstance, including audience needs,\n\n\\(^{71}\\) Compounding its status as the least practical of the three genres, epideictic rhetoric is often associated with the stigma of sophism, since the sophists often wrote and delivered funeral orations for hire (Sheard 767).\n\n\\(^{72}\\) Sheard argues that epideictic rhetoric should be considered a gesture, not a genre.\ndesires, expectations, attitudes, resources, and so on)” (771). For Sheard, epideictic rhetoric remains a kind of rhetoric that is dependent upon context.\n\nThe fundamental understanding of epideictic rhetoric as associated with values and context carries through even the most unorthodox treatments of this kind of rhetoric in rhetoric scholarship. For instance, Bruce McComiskey’s treatment of postmodern epideictic rhetoric—what he refers to as “graffitic immemorial discourse”—emphasizes the subversive capacity of epideictic rhetoric. McComiskey explains that, “like sophistic epideictic rhetoric, postmodern epideictic rhetoric is immemorial because its primary goal is to subvert dominant-class hegemonic discourse” (93). Here, McComiskey connects epideictic rhetoric with non-dominant values, but values nonetheless. McComiskey also notes that postmodern epideictic rhetoric shares further similarities with its sophistic predecessor in that “its signs derive meaning as much from their sociotextual contexts as from their referential content” (93). Here, McComiskey emphasizes epideictic rhetoric’s dependence upon context as much as reference, before explaining that postmodern epideictic rhetoric can subvert hegemonic discourse by either transplanting or collaging signifiers and contexts (94). Although McComiskey argues for a subversive kind of epideictic rhetoric, he defines this rhetoric with reference to its orthodox components: values and context. Thus, McComiskey’s treatment can be seen as a successful attempt to interrogate the conventional components of epideictic rhetoric and stretch them to their limit, that limit being representation’s limit. Even though McComiskey’s discussion of postmodern epideictic rhetoric draws upon Derrida and is prefaced by discussions of Baudrillard, among others, it is ultimately a discussion that\nunderstands rhetoric as representation. McComiskey writes that “graffitty immemorial discourse represents what has been left unrepresented” (93).\n\nDerrida and Baudrillard each suggest an epideictic rhetoric that moves rhetoric beyond representation. Indeed, both thinkers conceive of epideictic rhetoric in ways that abandon conventional understandings of epideictic rhetoric as characterized by context and values. Derrida’s conception of *différance* severs the dependence of written epideictic rhetoric upon context. Context, for Derrida, is an inadequate concept with regards to written discourse of any kind, not just written epideictic rhetoric. As Derrida acknowledges, “a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription” (1481). According to Derrida, the ability of writing to drift and escape precise representation is a capacity which no context can encompass (1481). Derrida suggests that context should not be a defining characteristic of written epideictic rhetoric, even when it is argued, as it is by McComiskey, that the epideictic subverts context. The notion that written epideictic rhetoric can subvert context depends upon a mere perception of that piece of writing’s original context. In other words, arguments that see written epideictic rhetoric as subverting context reproduce the problem of context against which Derrida positions *différance*.\n\nThe suggestion that epideictic rhetoric be defined in ways that do not depend upon context is more intriguing than it is instructive, and it is limited. The notion that written discourse can escape context and make meaning in imprecise, decontextualized ways allows for the possibility that discourse can haphazardly develop, defend, or challenge value systems. Subsequently, Derrida’s work implies that rhetoric can\ninadvertently become epideictic. His brief analysis of J. L. Austin’s discussion of the performative utterance in terms of ritual (1485-6) further suggests that the ritualized rhetoric is not exempt from différance. For Derrida, the most highly ceremonial rhetoric is imprecise and it involves both possibility and risk. Although Derrida’s remarks in “Signature, Event, Context” might seem limited to written discourse, they are expansive in their reach, for Derrida sees writing as preceding speech.73 Derrida’s point is that no kind of rhetoric should be defined in terms of the inadequate concept of context.\n\nWhile Derrida, for his part, reveals inadequacy of the contextual component of epideictic rhetoric, Baudrillard, for his part, revises the relationship between epideictic rhetoric and the value contemporary society places upon vitality. Baudrillard’s deployment of fatal strategies proves an explicit endorsement of epideictic rhetoric. The society that values vitality, productivity, life, and the laboring body—the society against which Baudrillard rallies—is the same society that denigrates the epideictic as not vital to its functioning and, consequently, inferior to forensic rhetoric or deliberative rhetoric. Baudrillard’s writings marshal epideictic rhetoric against this very society—a modern society that values vitality. Baudrillard explains that fatal strategies are inextricably connected to ceremony, stating “ceremony is the equivalent of fatality”; and it is in Baudrillard’s description of ceremony that a new challenge for obituary writing is located (203). Indeed, Baudrillard laments the decline of strong, rule-based ceremony into arbitrary conventions. What were once time-honored, ritualized rules have now become purposeless mores known as etiquette and politeness. Baudrillard contends that “ceremonies were established in order to regulate appearance and disappearance,” but today we are faced with simultaneous, unregulated appearance and disappearance (213).\n\n73 See Of Grammatology.\nBaudrillard theorizes epideictic rhetoric in terms of a ceremony that moves beyond representation. For Baudrillard, contemporary ceremony challenges representation. He describes ceremony as “violence against representation” (208), and argues that ceremony attempts “to maintain the tiny distance that makes the real play with its own reality; that plays with the disappearance of the real while exalting its appearance” (211). Contemporary ceremony further entails art, including the art of rhetoric. “It is in art,” Baudrillard writes, “that something of this ceremonial power has been preserved” (211). He resolutely describes the ceremonial in terms that correspond to what rhetoric scholars recognize as figurative turning, or tropological language. For Baudrillard, the ceremonial constitutes “the art of a certain turning, fatal and enigmatic, that rules over the apparition and the disappearance of things” (201). As Baudrillard sees it, language and writing should be conceived not as a system of values or interpretation, but instead as a system of rules. “Language is immanent, as is rite,” says Baudrillard, and the ceremonial prowess of both “tells us what to do, period” (205). Here, Baudrillard attempts to carve out a ceremonial space for all language. Ceremony enables a duel between appearance and disappearance, where rules set the two orders in opposition. Baudrillard thus conceives of all language as ceremonial rhetoric, which challenges the drive to make meaning. In epideictic rhetoric, Baudrillard locates the capacity to interrogate the value systems of society in a way that moves beyond representation. Ceremonial rhetoric sets up the rules of the game between appearance and disappearance and lets the two sides play.\n\n---\n\n74 This description invokes the figurative turning, or tropological turning, that some rhetorical scholars say characterizes poststructuralist rhetoric.\nTo understand Baudrillard’s conception of epideictic rhetoric is to understand his conception of theory. Baudrillard states that “[t]heory is just like ceremony” (217). He explains that “both are produced to prevent things and concepts from touching indiscriminately, to create discrimination, and remake emptiness, to redistinguish what has been confused” (217). Like ceremony, theory initiates, separates, and arranges:\n\nStruggling against the viviparious obscenity of the confusion of ideas, struggling against the promiscuity of concepts—that is theory (when it is radical), and ceremony too has never done anything else, when it separates the initiated from the uninitiated (for ceremony is always initiatory), when it distinguishes between what connects according to the rule and what doesn’t (for ceremony is always organizing), between what is exalted and destroyed according to its very appearance and that which is produced only as meaning. (217)\n\nThus, it is in their respective struggles against confusion that strong ceremony and radical theory are comparable, if not coextensive. By highlighting the similarities in the purpose of epideictic rhetoric and theory writing, Baudrillard suggests that writing theory is an additional manifestation of ceremonial rhetoric.\nConclusion:\n\nMethod and Rhetoric: Disciplines and Definitions\n\nMethod has posed problems for rhetoric and the relationship between method and rhetoric has been the subject of much debate for millennia, from rhetoric’s first appearance to its most recent manifestations. Baudrillard provides scholars in rhetorical studies with perhaps one of the more recent illustrations of the problems method poses for rhetoric. Method must be considered as a process applied to a given rhetorical object as well as a process that composed that object; it must be conceived of as both a critical method as well as a rhetorical method. If critics fail to consider the rhetorical method of controversial rhetors, such as Baudrillard, then they risk dismissing provocative writers and speakers as obscure stylists. With each dismissal of a controversial rhetor, rhetorical studies passes on an opportunity to embolden and explore rhetorical concepts, as well as to develop and test methods.\n\nMethod, however, need not pose problems for rhetoric. To conclude this project, I aim to resolve the troubling relationship between rhetoric and method by offering a methodological definition of rhetoric: Rhetoric is the meeting of two methods. I aim to illustrate that this definition is grounded in the history of rhetorical studies by providing a very brief glimpse of the relationship between method and rhetoric in classical Greece. Then, I quickly turn to more contemporary discussions of the relationship between method and the disciplinary status of rhetorical studies in the contemporary academy. I argue that a methodological definition of rhetoric will not only allow rhetorical critics to bracket the questions that forestall the study of rhetoric, but will also imbue rhetorical studies with a research status that it has, in some contexts, so desperately sought.\nThe history of the relationship between method and rhetorical studies reaches back to the first appearance of the word *rhetoric* in Plato’s *Gorgias*. Indeed, the very word *rhetoric* seems to have been birthed in response to questions about rhetoric’s relationship to method. The dialogues captured in *Gorgias* suggest that much disagreement existed as to whether rhetoric could be considered a method that pursued knowledge and aligned with virtue, or whether rhetoric was an ambivalent venture that could be applied to unscrupulous ends. For example, take the dialogue between Socrates and Callicles that addresses the genuine and spurious arts. In this dialogue, Socrates bluntly acknowledges “that there is a particular method to be practised in the acquisition of each” (5000d). Thus, method provides the basis for Socrates’s evaluation of rhetoric.\n\nIn classical times, studies of rhetoric often entailed a critical inspection of method, and this type of concurrent inquiry is perhaps best exemplified by Aristotle’s *On Rhetoric*. In *On Rhetoric*, Aristotle responds to Plato’s *Gorgias* by forwarding a more nuanced understanding of rhetoric, and, most importantly, expounding rhetoric as a method. That is to say, besides discussing rhetoric’s relationship to method, Aristotle presents rhetoric as a method. As George Kennedy acknowledges, Aristotle realizes “that rhetoric, like dialectic, was an art, capable of systematic description, which differed from most other arts and disciplines in teaching a method of persuasion that could be applied to many different subject matters” (14). As Aristotle’s *On Rhetoric* emphasizes, the earliest discussions of rhetoric and method focused, at least in part, upon whether or not rhetoric constituted a method and many of these early discussions embraced the\nunderstanding of what I have outlined as a rhetorical method, or the procedures a rhetor uses in composition.\n\nOver time, however, method seemed to be lauded and rhetoric denigrated, so much so that discussions of the two seemed separate and disjointed. This trend continued well into the early part of the twentieth century, when rhetorical studies was slowly resuscitated in the academy. As interest in rhetorical studies grew, so too did the need for legitimacy and status. Rhetoric, once considered in terms of a method itself, began searching for method.\n\nThe Greek roots of the word method refer to the “pursuit of knowledge” and, indeed, research in the academy works to generate knowledge (“Method”). But, modern institutional contexts often imply that not all knowledge is generated equally. Arguably, the allocation of institutional resources indicates a disciplinary hierarchy that favors applied research over basic research, and the so-called hard sciences over the so-called soft sciences over the humanities and arts. Within this hierarchy, method seems to maintain the disciplinary hierarchy; the strictest set of research procedures are deemed replicable and imbued with institutional status, while more fluid research processes are considered contingent and more haphazard. Rigorous research methods maintain the association between the word *method* and scientific disciplines, connoting control and order (“Method”). This status is lost on more relaxed methods that consider research a more contingent process.\n\nIn the research institution, method accrues status and maintains hierarchies, as some rhetorical scholars have acknowledged. These individuals often cite the lack of a method in rhetorical studies and comment upon the attempts of the field to establish\nmethod. Whether these rhetoric scholars associate with rhetoric and writing or rhetoric and speech, there is, from their perspective, some consensus that rhetoric lacks a method and that rhetoric must steal, borrow, poach, or clip methods from other academic fields. In 1969, Walter Fisher not only acknowledged the dependency of rhetoric and speech on method for its academic identity, but he also suggested that method functioned as “a means of redemption” and as a “way to achieve ‘academic respectability’” (102). James Jasinski’s summary of Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland provides an additional example of how the status of method in rhetorical studies contrasts with the status of method in other disciplines. Noting the “continued significance of method,” Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland state that “[m]ethod has been and continues to be of prime concern to most critics” (39-40; qtd. in Jasinski). Despite the fact that methods in rhetorical studies “do not have the procedural rigor or systematicity that typically characterizes a method,” Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland observe that “many critics treat them as if they were equivalent to the analytic methods and instruments of science […] as if they provided a direct and universal-access bridge for the critics between ‘data’ and theoretical generalizations” (39-40; qtd. in Jasinski). Deploying rhetoric to make rhetoric’s lack of method more tenable, scholars have actually celebrated the mixed methods in rhetorical studies. Janice Lauer, for instance, contends that, early on, rhetoric and writing “saw the value of building on relevant work in other fields and of using methods of investigation refined elsewhere” (“Composition” 26).\n\nAn evenhanded treatment of the contemporary relationship between method and rhetoric is found in the first chapter of Edwin Black’s *Rhetorical Criticism*. Black opens his chapter with the proclamation: “The scientist is one of the cultural heroes of our age”\nHe will later admit that there are “certain disadvantages” to the ascendency of the scientist and science, but that the influence of the scientist and science upon society is undeniable (2). According to Black, the triumph of the scientist and science has made “scientific methodology a model for thought” (2). Black writes that “[s]cholars in all branches of learning are called upon for increasing precision of thought, clarity of expression, and refinement of methodology” and he surmises that the rhetorical critic feels this methodological pressure (2). Black discusses the relationship between method and rhetoric in accordance with the disciplinary divide that separates the sciences from the humanities. His first chapter compares the critic to the scientist, revealing the points of tension between these two cultures. Black’s goal, of course, is not to engage in disciplinary warfare, but rather to assess the relationship between method and rhetoric. As I have previously noted in this project, Black finds the relationship wanting.\n\nYet, the admitted—ashamed, for some, and glorified, for others—modeling of methods from other fields and disciplines leaves the impression that rhetorical studies lacks method and, moreover, that it lacks legitimacy. The classical and contemporary discussions, which I have touched upon only briefly (and far too briefly at that), suggest that, between classical times and contemporary times, a wedge has been placed between rhetoric and method. The almost coterminous relationship of rhetoric and method in classical times, when rhetoric was evaluated as a method, has separated to such a degree that, in contemporary times, rhetoric is now seen as lacking a method and looking to other disciplines for one. Though inaccurate, the final impression is that rhetoric is not predisposed to method.\nA Methodological Definition of Rhetoric and Rhetorical Studies\n\nContrary to the claim that rhetoric is not predisposed to method, or that it lacks method, it is my assertion that rhetoric is defined by method. More precisely, I contend that rhetoric is constituted by method; that rhetoric is not an object, not an event, not a movement, not a network, not an act, not an artifact, and not a constellation. Instead, rhetoric is the meeting of at least two methods. Rhetoric is, in other words, the convergence of two methods, procedures, or processes.\n\nConvention conceives of rhetoric as the meeting of two methods, in which the first method is inventive, heuristic, or rhetorical and the second method is interpretative, hermeneutic, or critical. This understanding of rhetoric can loosely be understood as production and consumption. However, rhetoric can also be defined as the meeting of two critical methods or even as the meeting of two rhetorical methods. Throughout this project, I have engaged with rhetoric as it manifests itself at all three of these methodological interstices. In chapter five, for instance, I considered the discourse that resulted from the production and reception of two obituaries, as might be conventional. But, I also considered rhetoric as it manifested itself in the meeting of two critical methods, in that I considered the differences between Bruce McComiskey’s mobilization of a Baudrillardian framework to forward a conception of the postmodern epideictic and my own mobilization of Baudrillardian exchange to suggest a revised epideictic. In that final chapter, I also suggested the way in which rhetoric might be conceived of a meeting of two rhetorical methods. Here, I entertained the possibility that the principle of accurate representation might have guided Carlin Romano’s composition of Baudrillard’s\nobituary, just as the principle of a strong challenge, or fatal strategy, might have provided Romano with his compositional method.\n\nWhen rhetorical critics define rhetoric as the meeting of at least two methods, they discover new opportunities for interpretation at countless methodological interstices. As a result of the multitude of these interstices, the rhetorical critic that takes a methodological approach to rhetoric must focus on certain questions and issues, while bracketing others. Defining rhetoric as the convergence of two methods will not only allow rhetorical critics to bracket the questions that forestall the study of rhetoric, but it will also imbue rhetorical studies with a research status that it has, at certain times and particular contexts, so desperately sought.\n\nOver a decade into the twenty-first century, rhetorical studies has emerged as an interdisciplinary endeavor that aligns with the interdisciplinary visions of many institutions. Yet, the prowess of rhetorical studies in certain venues has been stymied by the lack of a clear method and the absence of one uniform definition of rhetoric. Those outside the field of rhetoric are sometimes unsure of what rhetorical studies actually studies and how those studies are conducted. The methodological definition of rhetoric that I propose here addresses these two issues and positions rhetorical studies as ripe for interdisciplinary and extra-institutional work. To follow Black, there seems to be no reason why the rhetorician cannot be one of the cultural heroes of our age.\nWorks Cited\n\n\nBallif, Michelle. *Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure*. Carbondale, IL; Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Print.\n\n\n"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":76291,"string":"76,291"}}},{"rowIdx":92,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"93b7dfe1abad6b2e2965f579faf2294d16a4e26b"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"Braille is NOT a Language\nDiane P. Wormsley, Ph.D.\n\nA Position Statement of the Braille Authority of North America\nAdopted November 8, 2008\n\nThe Braille Authority of North America (BANA) often receives requests to verify the status of braille as a language, in order that students may use it to qualify for language credit at high schools and sometimes colleges. It is the position of BANA that braille is not a language but a code. While BANA applauds high schools and colleges which wish to give credit for learning braille, it cannot accept the premise that braille is a language.\n\nIn *Foundations of Braille Literacy*, Rex et.al (1994) state, “Braille is *not* a language; since it is a portrayal of print, with special rules and multiple uses of each sign (configuration), it is a code. English is the language, one that can be conveyed in any number of ways as long as the code is systematic and is agreed to by those who use it” (pp. 30-31). In fact, the language does not need to be English. Any language can be conveyed in braille, and numerous languages around the world are reproduced in braille with the code differing, of course, based upon the language being encoded.\n\nPerhaps those who assert that braille is a language are confused about the status of braille relative to American Sign Language. ASL is so often associated in people’s minds with braille, possibly because of their familiarity with Helen Keller, who used both braille and ASL due to her Deafblindness. However, while ASL meets the definition of a language, it is generally arbitrary in the use of signs, and uses complex syntax (Comrie, 2008), whereas braille does not.\n\nLanguages have the major components of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics (Comrie,2008). Braille is developed and concerned with the representation of the symbols used in print. To call braille a language would be comparable to calling “print” a language. Print and braille are similar in that each reproduces the various sounds of language to represent speech, but neither is a language.\n\nAnother indication that braille should not be considered a language is found in consulting the Ethnologue, a comprehensive listing of the known living languages of the world, compiled by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Gordon, 2005). Braille is not included in the Ethnologue as a separate language but is mentioned under the heading of “Blind population” with the comment that “information about the availability of [b]raille codes and [b]raille literature is given under specific languages.” This confirms the\nconnection of braille as a code to specific languages, rather than as a language by itself.\n\n"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":588,"string":"588"}}},{"rowIdx":93,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"fc847c43df210a24f5f224ce5b74d7ff230cac25"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"Introduction\n\nResearch into the relationship between language and gender identity in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics has evolved considerably since its emergence in the 1970s, when it was primarily concerned with two things: demonstrating that power inequalities between the sexes were reflected in the language women were socialised into using, and finding evidence for – and explaining – linguistic differences between the sexes. As will be shown below, a key development in the field – largely since the 1990s – has been a greater emphasis on constructionist approaches to gender. In this chapter, gender is considered as a dimension of identity, both in terms of how gender identities are performed by speakers themselves and in terms of how gender is represented in texts. Before introducing research in this area, however, it is important to define what we mean by the term gender.\n\nGender concerns cultural norms about what roles and identities are considered to be appropriate for women or men, such as whether something is feminine or masculine. It is important to note that gender in this sense is not a synonym for sex difference. Gender may include the concept of femininity, for example, which may refer to a person’s appearance or their personality; they may wear soft, pastel colours in their clothing or makeup and they may be caring, polite or nurturing in their behaviour. At least some of these features are learnt as a result of a person’s socialisation as a female, yet they are often taken to be inherent or essential qualities. This essentialist view is popular and pervasive and is used to explain another cultural assumption: that there are two genders naturally attached to two sexes. Labelled by Connell (1987) as ‘the gender order’, this refers to the dominant idea that men and women are binary opposites; they are fundamentally different from one another (dichotomous) and hold certain characteristics, such as men being strong and women being emotional. Within Western societies, there has historically been no cultural recognition of people who fall outside of this binary system of gender, meaning that a person who identifies differently – the ‘effeminate’ gay man, ‘mannish’ lesbian or transsexual person, for instance – has typically been classed as deviant or ‘other’ (Foucault 1978).\n\nThe perceived existence of two clear, fixed and opposing genders is part of an ideological system. Ideologies are prevalent ideas of what is normal or natural and they vary from culture to\nculture. Our experiences in a given society provide us with particular beliefs, and our position in that society (in terms of our class, gender, ethnicity and so on) informs the ways in which we relate to those beliefs; Bourdieu (1977) terms this ‘habitus’. By recognising that what is normal is defined by our habitus and the prevailing ideologies in our society, we may view concepts related to gender, such as the gender order, as socially constructed. In other words, these concepts are created via ideological norms that shape our expectations, such as those relating to the roles and behaviours of women and men. In turn, we may say that these ideologies are produced via salient discourses, or particular ‘sets of ideas’ which carry weight in society (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2013: 28). Language and gender scholars work to uncover these discourses, both in terms of how they are produced by people through the language that they use, but also in terms of how they are invoked and reinforced through the language that is used to talk about women and men. An important aspect of this, discussed below, is the way that particular gender identities are privileged in Western culture as being more (or less) normal than others.\n\nThis chapter will begin by exploring this notion of normality by outlining key concepts in relation to gender and identity. It will then provide a discussion of constructionist approaches to language and gender, including both modern and postmodern perspectives, before considering ongoing issues relevant to gender identity for applied linguistics. In particular, this discussion will consider: how gender identities are performed; issues of masculinity, femininity and transgender identities; communities of practice; and representations of gender in written texts. The chapter will conclude with a summary and some observations about key issues in the field to be addressed.\n\nOverview\n\nGender as a normative system\n\nBy viewing gender as a set of ideas or ideologies about what is normal, attention is drawn to the fact that many of the beliefs we have about women and men – such as that women are naturally caring and men are naturally competitive – suit the interests of the most powerful members of society. This draws on the Gramscian (1971) notion of ‘cultural hegemony’, the theory that most people in society live by certain ideological norms because they seem natural and broadly in the interests of society as a whole, yet may in fact primarily benefit those with cultural, political or economic power. The concept of patriarchy, for instance, whereby men have historically had authority, can be seen to be reflected in many of the everyday norms that are often taken for granted; men are less likely than women to give up their jobs in order to be the primary caretaker to their children (because women are seen to be inherently more caring), and women are less likely than men to hold leadership positions (because they are seen to be less psychologically suited to such a role).\n\nTied into this is the notion of heteronormativity: the cultural expectation that people not only adhere to the gender order, but that they also naturally desire the ‘opposite’ sex (see Gray, this volume). Heteronormative ideologies include beliefs about the gendered roles that individuals take up within a (heterosexual) relationship, such as those regarding the family, as well as those regarding dating and sex itself. For example, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2013) refer to what they call ‘the heterosexual market’, a point in a child’s life when their social lives begin to be split according to the gender order. Important ideologies that children learn at an early stage include the idea that boys and girls are complementary and that they should eventually be paired up together; children often play out dating games, where ‘relationships’ will last anything from a few hours to a few days, long before any sort of sexual desire has emerged (ibid.). By engaging in these activities, children are repeating what they see in broader society,\nand are reproducing and reinforcing fundamentally heteronormative discourses. They are also performing a gender identity.\n\nWhen thinking about the notion of gender as a performance, language and gender scholars tend to draw on the important work of Butler (1990), who frames femininity and masculinity as identities that are achieved, rather than as aspects of the self which are essential. Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ demonstrates that gender is produced via cultural acts, including language, dress and other forms of self-presentation. Butler argues that we perform our gender, albeit often unconsciously, through mundane and everyday acts. We engage in these acts – such as putting on makeup or a dress – again and again, until we no longer view them as a performance; they seem to be natural. Scholars of language and gender have made much use of the concept of performativity, as will be discussed later, as it helps to explain the importance of language for reinforcing and projecting gendered identities.\n\n**Approaches to studying language and gender identities**\n\nAlthough the prevalent position of sociolinguists and applied linguists who currently study language and gender is to take a constructionist approach, early research in the field was focused less on deconstructing and challenging heteronormative ideologies associated with the gender order and more with the feminist activist concern of highlighting social differences between the language used by women and men. Three main approaches to understanding the relationship between language and gender emerged from the 1970s onwards, now recognised as the ‘deficit’, ‘difference’ and ‘dominance’ approaches. Cameron (2005) refers to research taking these approaches as modern, as opposed to postmodern, the latter term indicating the emphasis on deconstructing binary gender that developed largely from the 1990s, and the former reflecting the research that laid the foundations for this. These approaches to language and gender are outlined in more detail below.\n\n**Modern approaches to language and gender**\n\nLakoff’s (1975) account of women’s and men’s language is typically heralded as the beginning of scholarly work into differentiating linguistic styles on the basis of gender, and is widely referred to as the deficit approach. Her work had the explicitly feminist aim of drawing attention to the ways that women were expected to use language. Lakoff argued that women had a subordinate position in a patriarchal society and that one way in which this was perpetuated was by socialising girls into language considered to be ‘ladylike’. The features Lakoff identified as part of what she called ‘Women’s Language’, which included the use of tag questions and intensifiers, were thought to be culturally deficient because they indicated, among other qualities, hesitancy and uncertainty; Lakoff argued that this put women at a cultural and social disadvantage to men.\n\nLakoff’s claims led to two alternative approaches to language and gender: difference and dominance. Approaches based on difference argued that women’s style of communication was not deficient, but simply different. Women’s speech styles were claimed to be valuable and effective for conversation in ways that ‘men’s language’ was not (Bergvall 1999: 277). For example, Tannen (1990) argued that the language women were taught to use was effective in developing relationships and rapport, while men were socialised into using more competitive or technical, ‘report-oriented’ communicative styles. In order to make such claims, scholars taking a difference approach, such as Maltz and Borker (1982), drew on Gumperz’s (1982)\nwork on miscommunication in ethnically diverse cultures by arguing that men and women interact differently due to their socialisation into distinct gender subcultures. Approaches based on dominance, on the other hand, continued to argue that language perpetuated asymmetrical gender relations. Instead of seeing women’s language as lacking, however, men’s speech styles were seen to be problematic. For example, through an analysis of interruptions and overlaps in spoken interaction in mixed-sex talk, West and Zimmerman (1977) concluded that women’s speaking rights were on a par with children. Fishman’s (1980) study of spoken interaction among heterosexual couples reached similar conclusions, with Fishman famously coining the phrase ‘interactional shitwork’ to describe the conversational strategies that women employed to keep the conversation going with their male partners.\n\nIn order to make generalisable claims, research taking these approaches relied on certain assumptions of homogeneity. Cameron (2005) argues that much of the work from this time concerned itself with white, straight, middle-class, monolingual speakers, yet it was often taken as being representative of all women or all men. However, even at that time, work that suggested that not all women and men used language in such clear-cut, delineated ways was emerging. In a famous study of courtroom talk, for example, O’Barr and Atkins (1980) found that the features associated with the stereotypical ‘Women’s Language’ identified by Lakoff could reflect a powerless and inferior social position in society. This was based on the finding that men in subordinate occupational roles would also use the features that had been previously identified as feminine when in institutional settings (and vice versa). This demonstrated that language was not exclusively female or male, and was instead suggestive of how gender intersected with other identity inscriptions, such as social class and professional status, in spoken interaction.\n\nWhile work taking these approaches emphasised the fact that gender was not an inherent quality and was, instead, a consequence of women’s (and men’s) gendered socialisation, it did continue to rely on the notion of men and women as homogeneous (presumably white, heterosexual) entities. In this sense, such work ran the risk of reproducing essentialist ideologies of gender. By contrast, work taking a more explicitly constructionist focus – that termed postmodern by Cameron (2005) – aimed to deconstruct the binary gender categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ and sought out the ways in which multiple masculinities or femininities might be constructed among a diverse range of speakers. Such approaches are outlined below.\n\n**Postmodern approaches to language and gender**\n\nMany studies since the 1990s have aimed to challenge the concept of binary gender and view gender identity as performed. In doing so, they often draw on postmodern critiques of gender and of heteronormativity, which aim to deconstruct seemingly fixed ideological categories. From this perspective, gender is not only learnt according to the sex category a person falls into, but is also brought into being through being performed; gender may, therefore, not always be attached in a normative or expected way to a person based on their sex. In this sense, postmodern approaches to language and gender consider the interaction between gender and sexuality more fully, and are more concerned with liminal gender identities, particularly queer identities (those that are non-normative or non-mainstream [see Gray, this volume]).\n\nA seminal development of postmodern approaches to the study of language and gender identity has been the notion of ‘indexicality’. Indexicality concerns the semiotic process that exists within interaction, whereby speakers connect particular linguistic features with representations of the social groups that are stereotyped as using them (Irvine and Gal 2000). The term comes from the word index, meaning ‘to point to’; indexicality, then, is the process by which\nparticular ways of using language point towards, or indicate, culturally recognisable identities. This means that a speaker may use language that carries a particular ideological meaning associated with their gender, in turn gendering their identity performance. Ochs’s (1990) research with mothers in Samoa, who had a very specific cultural role of caregiving, illustrates this. She found that language seen to have a facilitative or caring function in Samoa was indexical of femaleness; this was because women in that community were associated primarily with nurturing roles and motherhood. Ochs classifies the indexical relationship between the language that the women in her study used and its cultural meaning (of being caring) as ‘direct’, but the relationship between a given linguistic feature and the category of woman as ‘indirect’. This is because the language itself did not directly index womanhood; rather, the language indexed caring, which in turn was something associated with women in this community. The importance of the sociocultural context in which language is being interpreted is therefore emphasised by Ochs and is strengthened by her finding that the same language features do not necessarily index femaleness in cultures where women have less of a primary caregiver role.\n\nIndexicality has an important role to play in bridging modern and postmodern studies of language and gender. Whereas early research highlighted the linguistic features that were stereotypically associated with women or men, including those that carried functions associated with dominance or powerlessness, a postmodern focus allows us to reinterpret those associations in terms of how speakers use language to index a wider range of cultural identities. Importantly, these identities need not be restricted to the generic categories of male and female that were studied in the past; it is possible instead to consider particular kinds of gendered self, which may exist in specific settings, or be realised in unique ways. This is considered below.\n\nIssues and ongoing debates\n\nIn the preceding section, we saw how postmodern approaches to language and gender identity take a constructionist approach. This means that gender identity is understood to be formed of cultural ideologies and performed by individuals through their everyday acts, rather than something innately connected to a person’s biological sex. In this section, I outline three main issues that have emerged for the study of language and identity with regard to gender as a result of this understanding: first, ways in which speakers have been found to perform gender identities through interaction; second, the construction of community-specific gender identities; third, how gender identities are represented.\n\nPerformances of gender identities\n\n‘Masculine’ identities\n\nContemporary research into language and gender identity often concerns speakers’ use of indexical relationships between linguistic features and cultural ideas about gender in order to perform their identity as a woman or a man. A range of gender identities is now considered but, partly as a result of the fact that women’s issues were at the forefront of feminist linguistics from the 1970s onwards, research was largely focused on women’s identities until Johnson’s (1997) edited collection on language and masculinity brought men’s identities firmly into focus.\n\nTypically, studies of language and masculinity have shown that men’s identities are constructed via the reproduction of stereotypes and ideologies that are specific to men rather than women, and that index hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity. Coates (2003), for example,\nfound that the white British men in her study indexed their masculinity through talk about topics that are stereotypically male, such as sports, women or technology. Similarly, Kiesling (1997) considered the hierarchical way in which a group of fraternity men organised themselves, analysing their language styles as competitive and arguing that men were likely to draw on discourses of power in order to construct their masculinity. Kiesling’s (2002) work with the same group also shows that masculinity can be performed and displayed through claims by the young men to have ‘conquered’ many women and to be both non-committal and sexually obtainable (even if they are in a long-term relationship). Through telling ‘fuck stories’, Kiesling argues, these young men were able to index their masculinity; in this way, it is clear that heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity are culturally intertwined. This is also evident from Cameron’s (2001) analysis of conversations between male undergraduate university students in America, whereby a male student was accused of being ‘the antithesis of man’ (ibid.: 173) due to his poor taste in clothes and women, and was ultimately branded as being gay. Hegemonic masculinity, it is shown, is at least partly based on heterosexuality.\n\nMasculinity does not always manifest itself in this hegemonic, heteronormative way, however. Research into gay men’s speech styles, for example, has shown that culturally specific forms of language can enable speakers to index their sexual identity, including coded, metaphorical forms (Leap 1996), a falsetto voice quality to index flamboyance and campness (Podesva 2007), and the use of language ideologically associated with femininity (Graf and Lippa 1995). As outlined earlier, however, an important aspect of postmodern approaches to language and gender includes challenging and deconstructing binary gender. Barrett’s (1995) work is an important example of this; he focused on African-American drag queens in order to pick apart essentialist assumptions about sex and gender. The men in his study used language that was indexical of stereotypical white femininity, black masculinity and homosexuality, a combination of which was used to perform an entirely new drag persona. Gender identity can thus be multifaceted and achieved in myriad ways, with indexical meaning shifting and changing according to the sociocultural context.\n\nSimilarly, Hall’s (1995) research with the operators of a telephone sex line shows how speakers can index ‘fantasy’ identities that do not necessarily reflect their own sense of self, often through the use of linguistic features ideologically associated with ‘bimbos’, virgins or nymphomaniacs, depending on what the client desires. An important part of Hall’s analysis is that not all those performing these various female roles were women; one was a gay man who could pass as female through his performative language use. This shows how we cannot assume that ‘the language of men’ necessarily involves the indexing of hegemonic masculinity.\n\nNonetheless, the understanding of norms of gender afforded to us by this research is extremely useful when applying linguistics to real-life contexts such as the classroom. Preece (2009), for example, identifies discursive strategies used by undergraduate students in a British university, showing that one way that young men from non-traditional backgrounds in higher education (particularly ethnic minorities and those who are working class) save face in an environment in which they feel marginalised is to adopt a laddish persona that indexes an indifference to academic success. In turn, this allows them to draw on ideologies associated with working-class masculinity, such as independence and toughness. By exploring the construction of gender in such contexts, work such as Preece’s may help to explain why gendered groups of university students may appear to be less engaged, and may therefore assist practitioners in providing more targeted support.\nAs with masculinities, there continues to be a rich discussion of language and femininities, though many of the studies taking place in the postmodern period investigate identities outside of the heteronormative gender order. For example, Bucholtz’s (1999) important study of self-identified ‘nerds’ in a US high school showed that not all white, middle-class girls identify with mainstream, heteronormative ideals of femininity. Indeed, rather than reproduce what is typically perceived as ‘cool’ for high school girls (being pretty and fashionable), the ‘nerds’ consciously performed an oppositional identity that was focused on academic success. For example, they deliberately wore unfashionable clothing, avoided slang terms and employed high-culture terminology (such as Latin) to demonstrate their intelligence. This allowed them to index a version of girlhood that was salient for them and which disrupted ideals of teenage femininity.\n\nSimilarly, studies of lesbian identity construction (e.g. Queen 2005; Morrish and Sauntson 2007; Jones 2012) have typically found that gay women often actively dissociate themselves from mainstream ideas of femininity in order to perform a non-heteronormative version of woman, showing again how issues of sexuality are intrinsically tied to questions of gender.\n\nResearch into how women’s identities are produced can also highlight how social inequalities are perpetuated, such as by looking at public and political contexts. Much emphasis in this area has been placed on examining the language of women in leadership or professional roles that have traditionally been seen as suited to men. Mullany (2011), for example, shows how female managers using language which indexes assertiveness or power – attributes which would classify most male managers as successful – tend to be negatively evaluated; by failing to conform to gendered norms surrounding their speech, they are often judged to be ‘scary’ or domineering. This harks back to Lakoff’s claim that women’s speech is evaluated as ‘deficient’ in the public domain, not only when they conform to ‘ladylike’ talk, but also when they do not. In this sense, research into language and gender can reveal much about the ways in which women are prevented from being successful as leaders (see also Holmes 2006; Baxter 2009).\n\nWork by McElhinny (1995), in contrast, finds that it is possible for women to gain respect and to ‘break the glass ceiling’, but only if they adapt their way of speaking to construct a new identity relevant to their workplace. Her study of police officers in Pittsburgh, for example, shows that female police officers who altered their voice, language and clothing to index a cool, professional identity were taken more seriously than if they conformed to overtly feminised styles. Despite demonstrating that it is possible for women to have success in what is culturally perceived to be ‘men’s work’, studies such as these also demonstrate that traditional expectations of femininity do not match cultural ideas of success, professionalism or authority.\n\nThis work reveals broader ideologies of gender normativity and the ways in which these ideologies not only constrain but also shape the identities it is possible for women to perform. As Litosseliti and Sunderland (2002: 11) outline, assumptions about what women’s (and girls’) roles will be may constrain the way in which they communicate and behave in educational contexts, by being more quiet or passive than boys. Research such as Swann’s (2009) has shown that gender is continually relevant in the classroom, as children engaged in activities that are not obviously gendered will still draw on their prior knowledge of gender norms when interacting in mixed-sex contexts, such as by making reference to heterosexual couplings in order to tease one another. This demonstrates the need for applied linguists doing language and identity studies to carefully consider the role that gender plays in educational, or other institutional, contexts.\nthat do not appear to be gendered. For applied linguists, then an understanding of how gender roles are produced and drawn upon is important when trying to understand patterns of language use in real-world contexts.\n\nTrans identities\n\nA less explored area of language and gender research concerns trans identities. The term ‘trans’, an abbreviation of transgender, is commonly used ‘to refer to all individuals who live outside of normative sex/gender relations’ (Namaste 2000: 1). Some trans people – but by no means all – take hormones or have surgery in order that their bodies match their gender identity, and the term ‘transsexual’ is often used in a medical context to refer to these individuals. People whose gender identity matches the biological sex they were assigned at birth may be categorised as being ‘cisgender’, or simply ‘cis’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the cultural privilege and dominance of cisgender people, the vast majority of work that has taken place so far into language and gender identity involves speakers who are cisgender, though this aspect of their identity would typically be implicitly presumed. A limited body of work has emerged to combat this, however.\n\nOne of the more established approaches to language and trans identities is the exploration of gendered grammar; Kulick (1996) considers how Brazilian transgender prostitutes use feminine gendered grammar to construct their own subjectivity as females, for instance, as does Livia (1995) in her analysis of the writings of a French trans woman. Other work aiming to explain language use outside of a binary gender system includes King’s (2015) consideration of an intersex individual and Hall and O’Donovan’s (1996) work with the Hijra community in India – eunuchs who are often categorised as ‘the third gender’.\n\nRecent research exploring other aspects of trans people’s language use includes Zimman’s (2012) important study. Using sociophonetics, he shows that trans men do not always use the entire pitch range generally associated with masculinity (though many do); this conflicts with the heteronormative expectation that a trans person would use language to allow them to pass as cisgender. He argues that, once trans men begin to be perceived as men through more outward styles and symbols, some feel less concerned about engaging fully in – and therefore indexing – heteronormative cis masculinity; some trans men may feel more comfortable including aspects of language in their speech that might be said to index femininity. This research is particularly important because it breaks free of the binary gender system; it shows that trans men do not simply ‘switch’ from a female-sounding to a male-sounding voice. Instead, it reveals that the experiences and identities of an individual will lead to a specific form of identity construction. Again, gender is revealed to be a complex phenomenon.\n\nCommunities of practice\n\nWhat has become increasingly evident in research exploring the performance of gender identities is the fact that groups of speakers, such as ‘nerd’ girls (Bucholtz 1999) or fraternity men (Kiesling 2002), develop ways of doing things that – within the context of their group – allow them to index a coherent identity specific to that group. Such analyses have been enabled partly by the development of the community of practice (CoP) approach, introduced to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992, 1999). The CoP, first established by Lave and Wenger (1991) as a theory of learning through shared participation, focuses on speakers who interact and engage together in a mutual endeavour, leading to shared practices or ‘ways of doing things’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999: 185), including ways\nof talking and interacting. The concept of the CoP has been extensively drawn on by Eckert. For example, in her ethnographic study of an American high school, Eckert uses the CoP to examine the practices of two recognisable groups in the school: the Jocks and the Burnouts (Eckert 2000). Eckert analysed their language use in relation to the social structures within the school, most specifically in terms of gender and class. The language practices of the Jocks were intrinsically tied to their social aspirations as middle-class kids, for example, as they used more standard forms of English to index an academically oriented persona. The Burnouts, by contrast, used non-standard forms that allowed them to index an affiliation with their local, working-class roots. Eckert found that there was a clear difference between each CoP in terms of gender; girls in the Jock group used more standard language than the boys, while Burnout girls used more non-standard language than Burnout boys. In both groups, then, the girls seemed to work harder than the boys at indexing their membership of the CoP; this reflects findings in variationist sociolinguistics that women may rely more on symbolic means of articulating their identities than men, who have historically been more able to gain power and prestige through such means as employment (see Labov 1990).\n\nThe CoP approach has been used in other studies of gender, including Mendoza-Denton’s (2008) research with Chicana girl gangs in California. Through ethnographic fieldwork, Mendoza-Denton learnt that the girls valued skills associated with fighting and qualities associated with loyalty. Because she understood these values from their perspective – a fundamental aim of ethnography – Mendoza-Denton was able to explain the various linguistic and stylistic practices that the girls engaged in; they wore eyeliner in a specific way to symbolise how tough they were and tended not to wear certain items of jewellery, such as earrings, in order to show that they were always ready to fight. These girls identified with some aspects of heteronormative femininity but in specific ways; they adopted or reworked familiar practices (such as wearing makeup) depending on how they suited their needs, enabling them to index a locally salient identity as gang girls. The CoP, then, has made an important contribution to the study of gender identity in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics because it enables us to move beyond predefined structures, such as those associated with binary gender, and encourages us to consider those who do not fit squarely – or normatively – into an ideological category.\n\nResearch using the CoP also emphasises the importance of understanding the context in which an identity is produced in order to gain clear insight into the meaning of that identity; this is very important to applied linguists hoping to learn more about how and why, for example, learners of a target language are more or less successful. Norton’s (2000) theory of ‘investment’ demonstrates this; she argues that success in acquiring a new language depends on the extent to which language learners feel invested in acquiring not only the target language but also the cultural advantages that come with it. In this sense, Norton sees language learning as not simply about learning a code, but as developing a new identity; successful learners will be able to imagine themselves benefiting from their use of a new language, such as by becoming a legitimate member of a new CoP. Norton’s work with immigrant women in Canada shows the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity for second language learners, as many of the women in her study were more invested in learning English if their role as a primary caregiver meant that they needed to be proficient in the language, or if their status as a single woman meant that they needed to avoid becoming vulnerable due to language weaknesses. Through in-depth research such as this, then, applied linguists can better understand the impact that gender identity has on real-world problems such as those that impact on migrants.\nRepresentations of gender identities\n\nIn addition to the analysis of gender identities as they are performed in everyday speech, linguists have considered how identities are represented in texts. By text, we may refer to spoken, written or multimodal forms of language. Many linguists interested in gender and sexuality use a critical discourse analysis approach (Fairclough 1989; also see Zotzmann and O’Regan, this volume) combined with feminist theory to see how texts contribute to the reproduction and maintenance, or even the resistance and transformation, of structural ideologies relating to heteronormativity and the gender order (see Lazar 2005; Benwell and Stokoe 2006). Critical discourse analysts are concerned with identifying, challenging and unpicking instantiations of discourse, with the aim of revealing how those with power and control over the production and distribution of texts push particular ideological discourses. This approach also reveals much about the identities we recognise within society, since they are legitimised through their repeated representation. In this sense, the analysis of texts in language, gender and sexuality research tends to focus on not only the text itself, but the way it has been created, why, by whom and for whom, and what consequences its creation has had (Baker 2008).\n\nFor example, by looking at media texts such as magazines, we can see how particular identity categories are represented by analysing assumptions made about a text’s audience. Talbot’s (1995) analysis of a teenage girls’ magazine tells us much about ideological femininity and the normative expectations surrounding girlhood, for instance. Talbot shows how the magazine writers create a ‘synthetic sisterhood’, using inclusive language that encourages their readers to feel as though they are being directly and personally addressed by an older sister figure, one who can advise them on the things that it is assumed will matter to them (how to wear makeup, for example). Talbot reveals the patriarchal notions present in the text (such as the idea that girls must make themselves look beautiful) but also demonstrates that the media are active in reproducing gender ideologies. These ideologies may be drawn upon by girls when attempting to index a salient feminine identity, one that allows them to fit in with their peers.\n\nMessages that spell out the norms for how women and men should behave have long been present in such media. For instance, Mills and Mullany (2011: 146) provide an example from a British women’s magazine in the 1950s where women are advised on how best to prepare for their husband’s daily return from work (by making sure the house is tidy, clean and quiet), thus perpetuating the ideology that women’s work is domestic and principally concerned with pleasing men. Though such overtly sexist representations may now strike us as shocking, evidence exists to suggest that indirect forms of sexism prevail in media texts today, such as in the depiction of women as either nagging annoyances or sex objects in British ‘lad’ magazines (Benwell 2003; Mills 2008).\n\nAs well as analysing texts where women or men are represented in sexist or heteronormative ways, research in this area can also concern analyses of texts where particular groups are not well represented. Of particular relevance to applied linguists is research that analyses resources used by language teachers, as these may often reveal important stereotypes and ideologies relating to gender. Scholars such as Sunderland (2004), for example, have found that women are often underrepresented in language learning textbooks, with male discourse frequently presented as the norm, or men rather than women being the initiators of conversations. In part, this is because the resources used to teach students a language are expected to represent, in some way, the culture in which that language is spoken; the ideology of men being more dominant than women continues to be salient in many English-speaking contexts. However, stereotypes in textbooks also have the potential to alienate certain readers, potentially impacting on their\nmotivation and investment in learning the target language, and also run the risk of reinforcing negative preconceptions that learners might have about the roles of women or men. In this sense, the study of how women and men are differently represented in such texts is an extremely important aspect of research into the representation of gender identity.\n\nSummary\n\nResearch into gender identities is of crucial importance to applied linguistics. Language and gender work demonstrates that there are gender inequalities regarding women and men’s experiences, opportunities and representations and can also show how these are perpetuated and reinforced. Whether we look at interactions occurring within institutional settings – workplaces where women are prevented from moving forward at the same pace as men, for instance, or schools where young children engage in a ‘heterosexual market’ – or whether we consider how ideologies of gender are reproduced in the media around us, we can both shed light on and begin to address real-world problems of structural, culturally ingrained systems of gender inequality by examining language in its context of use and noting how gender is of salience.\n\nHowever, just as modern approaches to language and gender might have inadvertently reinforced binary, heteronormative notions of gender identity, through its ambition to find evidence of differences between women and men, postmodern approaches with clear feminist intentions can still run the risk of reinforcing notions of normativity by being restrictive in the identities that are researched. For example, the vast majority of studies into gender and sexual identities that have been carried out consider cisgender speakers and there has not, as yet, been a large-scale linguistic study of trans women. It is important that more research into trans identities is developed, not only to prevent a cisgender bias in the field and to further deconstruct the sex/gender binary, but also to develop a much richer and more nuanced understanding of how complex gender identities are indexed and performed in real-world contexts.\n\nSimilarly, as argued above, the speakers typically included in many of the earlier studies into language and gender were white, middle-class, heterosexual Westerners. Increasing numbers of studies are taking place in non-Western contexts, such as Milani’s (2013; also see Milani, this volume) analysis of queer identity construction in South African online spaces, Ellece’s (2011) research into gender identities during marriage ceremonies in Botswana, and Borba and Ostermann’s (2007) work with Southern Brazilian trans communities. However, there is also a need to consider gender identity construction as it intersects with other identities beyond sexuality or nation, such as ethnicity, age or social class. As Crenshaw (1989) argues, different factors of a person’s subjective experience can combine to marginalise them in a very specific way. As feminist linguists, it is therefore crucial that we explain language use not simply in terms of a speaker’s identity as a woman, for example, but as a woman of a particular age, class, ethnicity, sexuality and so on. This means not only considering speakers of a variety of backgrounds and in a range of cultural contexts (though this is extremely important), but also acknowledging that many of the speakers that have been researched to date also had identities which were informed by their race or their social status; those who are white and middle class may be privileged, but their class and ethnicity are not neutral and their gender identity does not sit in isolation from these factors. Applied linguists must take all factors of speakers’ sociocultural identities into account in order to more fully explain their linguistic behaviour (see Block and Corona, this volume).\n\nIn this chapter, I have provided an account of key issues and debates surrounding language and identity studies in which gender is under examination. This chapter has demonstrated that\nlanguage produces, as well as reflects, ideological categories associated with heteronormativity and binary notions of gender. Research into language and gender has highlighted the myriad ways in which we index and perform gender and sexual identities in given contexts and the ways in which these identities are culturally represented. This research provides evidence of a cultural reliance on a system of binary gender that assumes speakers’ heterosexuality, as well as the diversity that actually exists in terms of the gendered identities that speakers construct.\n\nThe field of language and gender has changed enormously since its foundations were laid by feminist linguists in the 1970s, with current work using increasingly varied methods and approaches to study speakers and texts in a range of contexts and communities. As the field continues to evolve, however, it is important to remember its origins: at the heart of all we do when investigating language and gender in applied contexts must be the intention to highlight inequality, raise consciousness, create change and evaluate progress. The study of language and gender identities is, after all, a fundamentally feminist endeavour.\n\nRelated topics\nPositioning language and identity: poststructuralist perspectives; Identity in variationist sociolinguistics; Language and non-normative sexual identities; The significance of sexual identity to language learning and teaching; Language, gender and identities in political life: a case study from Malaysia; Straight-acting: discursive negotiations of a homomascule identity; Intersectionality in language and identity research; The future of identity research: impact and new developments in sociolinguistics.\n\nFurther reading\nBaker, P. (2008). Sexed texts. London: Equinox. (This book offers a very good introduction to key issues relating to language and gender, and intrinsic to this discussion is a consideration of sexual identity.)\nBucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (eds) (1995). Gender articulated: language and the socially constructed self. Abingdon: Routledge. (This edited volume brings together research using a wide range of methods and analytical tools, studying both gender and sexuality in a variety of cultural contexts. Despite the publication date it remains an enormously useful volume, marking a time of change in the field and reflecting the agenda of language, gender and sexuality scholars today.)\nEckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (2013). Language and gender. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This textbook provides a very thorough and detailed account of what gender is and how it is researched by linguists, as well as chapters dealing with key areas of inquiry such as politeness, style and assertiveness.)\nMills, S. and Mullany, L. (2011). Language, gender and feminism. London: Routledge. (In this textbook, Mills and Mullany show how feminism has been, and must continue to be, central to the methods and approaches used to analyse gendered discourse, while offering an up-to-date account of research in the field of language, gender and sexuality.)\n\nReferences\nLucy Jones\n\n\nLucy Jones\n\n\n"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":8790,"string":"8,790"}}},{"rowIdx":94,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"868f7f4686d5d0c06a4c54f34fc03970f454ca7a"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"Pisces are fish. Mr. Tedder Size was very fond of catching Pisces, meaning fish. In most instances the Pisces were very fond of young Mr. Tedder Size. Seldom was it that this astute gentleman returned from such an expedition without a scaly trophy. Not that Mr. Size ever sought to commercialize this exceptional ability. He would have been horrified at the mere suggestion, for he was first in life an Isaac Walton. When there was time left, Mr. Size attended strictly to business.\n\nIt was Tuesday. The sun came out as usual on schedule with the morning paper. It was quite as bright as it had been on Monday and on Sunday. There was a difference however. The difference lay in the fact that Tedder Size had gone fishing. Now Mr. Tedder Size should not have gone fishing, for he had a position in a downtown firm. At least that was an opinion voiced by Mr. Richard Envey in red faced anger. Being the boss, Mr. Envey was entitled to his opinion, in respectful deference to his material gains.\n\nWhile Mr. Envey spluttered, Mr. Tedder Size fished. Where the current ran in blue pertinent ripples, he fished the hardest. In the corner of his mouth a fire-pitted pipe smoked blue-clouded derision for all the Mr. Enveys in the world. As he fished Mr. Size spoke in gentle persuasive tones to a wriggling Crayfish. The Crayfish which was acting in the capacity of bait dangled in officious effrontery at the end of the tapered leader. It gazed with accusing eyes at the fisherman. Crayfish have been used as bait for centuries. For this reason they have adopted the fatalistic attitude of the Far East and remain perfectly stoic. His particular Crayfish, silently murmured Insh'allah and continued to stare at Mr. Tedder Size. He stared not pleadingly but instead with the round-eyed wonderous look of a thoroughly astonished Crayfish.\n\nMr. Size's appearance was indeed astonishing. Ladies who passed in their cars were pleasantly shocked, and not a few halted their cars to watch the angler. His black hair stood up in tangled sobriety. Below the unruly hair, a brown face smiled encouragement from without hazel eyes, at the Crayfish. The young man wore no shirt. Clad only in his under-breeches, and a pair of hip-boots, he waded in the stream. With an unsympathetic flip he tossed the Crayfish back into the water. The plop was scarcely perceptible. A breeze blew gently across the water. It left little waves where small ripples were beginning to form.\n\nThe breeze blew over the watchful ladies' heads. It blew up and down furrows in a newly plowed field and whipped the plowman's shirt. With an added exuberance it dashed into town and raced for the open windows of a great white office building. Dancing among Mr. Richard Envey's correspondence, the breeze helped to cool that worthy's cheeks. When Mr. Envey's temperature had been sufficiently reduced he noticed Miss Kate Lacee.\n\nMiss Lacee was a stenographer. In spite of that she was an exceptional person, for she was pretty, and pretty girls who work are exceptional. Not only could Miss Lacee type, but she always knew where to find Mr. Size. As Mr. Size was al-\nways ready to admit, she had a pestiferous knack for discovering his retreats.\n\n'Well Ummhnuph,' spluttered the irate Mr. Envey who felt his temperature take a leap upward. Before he had completed the last syllable of his short speech Miss Kate Lacee was gone. She went quickly from the room in a panic of cloudy auburn hair. As the neat fitting brown loose knit suit vanished around the door-jam, the keys to Mr. Envey's auto disappeared too.\n\nIn the street outside the office, the sun was shining. Soft white clouds wrapped tall buildings in a wooly mist. Behind the mist the sky was blue. Turquoise blue, thought Miss Lacee, as she jumped in a ladylike fashion into Mr. Envey's car. Before starting the motor the young lady waved her hand. Officer Bammy Roick, policeman on the beat, was the object of the wave. The officer waved back.\n\n\"'Tis really beautiful,\" murmured the law officer. He included the whole world with an expansive gesture. With the other hand he wrote out a ticket for an unappreciative motorist. The unlucky driver stared after the long car with the pretty girl at the wheel. He sighed, in harmony with the policeman, but not for the same reason.\n\nThe car sped east on the smooth highway. The noon sun grew steadily warmer. Curves flashed into sight and were lost behind the long car. When Miss Lacee noticed the crowd of watchful ladies near a bridge she slowed the vehicle. Making certain, she stopped, and got out. Then she saw Mr. Size. Mr. Size was fishing and paying very little attention to the ladies except out of the corner of his eye. Kate Lacee made her way to the stream edge with a determined stride.\n\n\"Hello, Apollo,\" she said.\n\n\"Hello,\" came the answer. The answer was followed by a series of plops. The Crayfish figured in the plops.\n\nUnder the sun the blue water mellowed in tone. It softened into a warm color on some artist's palette. The crowd of ladies had gone after noting the determined glint in Miss Lacee's eyes. Under the protective halo afforded by a huge willow tree, two figures fished. They stood in mid-stream. One of the figures wore a loose knit suit. The breeze freshened across the water as a brace of Crayfish plopped into the stream.\n\nThe breeze blew in gusty waves toward the west. In fact it blew toward town. On a street corner in town a man wiped a florid face with his handkerchief. The breeze fluttered the damp cloth. The man was Mr. Richard Envey; beside him stood Officer Bammy Roick.\n\n\"My car's been stolen!\" said the excited Richard to the policeman.\n\nThe officer mistook Mr. Envey for the mayor. Since the mayor, also a power in local politics, the policeman became excited.\n\n\"This way, sir,\" avowed the officer of the law, and helped Mr. Richard Envey into the cramped quarters of his motorcycle sidecar. With a roar they headed into the breeze. As they left, another officer in another part of town, tore up a police sticker with Officer Bammy Roick's name signed to it.\n\nThe breeze grew quiet as the sun sank behind the willow tree. The stream turned to a deeper shade of marine and grew as quiet as the breeze. That is, with the exception of four little spreading rings of waves where Crayfish had been plopped into the pool beneath the willow tree.\n\n\"I'm not the mayor,\" emphatically denied Mr. Richard Envey.\n\n\"Shh, be quiet,\" whispered Officer Bammy Roick, \"I've got a bite.\" As indeed he had."},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":1498,"string":"1,498"}}},{"rowIdx":95,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"5f1ed3ac0281e1a3c9cfbc4c6831d09237691c27"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"to Luke was interpreted as a manifestation of not only of Christ's human nature but also of his being the son of God. E.g. for Origen, the genesis of Christ makes his two natures clear.\n\nFor Christian writers such as Origen, Eusebius, Ambrose and Augustine, the incompatibility between the genealogies in Matthew and Luke was not essential because the genealogies were not historical documents of Jesus' noble descent but theological expressions. The genealogies in the two gospels manifested their kerygma of Christ's double nature in their own way, Matthew of his human nature and Luke of his divinity.\n\nThe church fathers from Origen onwards offered allegorical interpretations in which deeper meanings were sought for Jesus' forefathers. For Eusebius the genealogy in Matthew was an example of the double reality of the Scripture, the \"letter\", i.e. the historical reality and the \"spirit\", i.e. the deeper theological reality. The writer of the Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum saw a deeper reality hidden from humans in Jesus' family tree in Matthew. Thus, Christian writers, e.g. Augustine, tried to find these secret deeper meanings by explaining the generations of Jesus' forefathers by number symbolism and the names of his ancestors by allegorical interpretations.\n\n*Maijastina Kahlos*\n\n\nThis book, partly based on a conference held at the University of Exeter in July 1992, consists of an introduction by the editors and eleven papers on different aspects of Roman literary culture. The linking theme between these is the interpretation of the presentations of passions in Roman literary texts from a philosophical point of view and the combination of philosophical and literary approaches of interpretation to obtain a clearer picture of the Roman mind (pp. 2,4). The volume is an indication of, and a natural sequel to, the constantly growing interest in the theories of passion and especially their adaptations to non-philosophical territories. The papers include an analysis of Cicero (A. Erskine), Juvenal (S.M. Braund), Tacitus (D.S. Levene), Catullus (J. Booth), Virgil (M.R. Wright), Statius (E. Fantham), and two analyses of Seneca (M. Wilson and A. Schiesaro). In addition to these, there are also papers on Epicurean anger (D.P. Fowler), on the role of emotions in rhetoric (R. Webb), and on an aspect of passion in Roman poetry (C. Gill).\n\nIn general, this volume is a most welcome project because in the classics it often seems that the boundary between philosophical and literary studies is an artificial one, or at least one without clear or well-founded reasons. There are, however, numerous problems in establishing a methodologically valid, intellectual continuum that would give a better understanding of these many-sided phenomena than the traditional division between philosophy and literature has given. The informative introduction by Gill and Braund concentrates on describing the framework for the papers and the unavoidable problems encountered in them. In the latter part of the introduction Gill gives a brief but lucid presentation of the importance of the emotions in Greco-Roman philosophy. In studying Roman thinking he stresses the importance of three Aristotelian approaches: Aristotelian school texts, Peripatetic tradition, and the conventional or 'vernacular' approach being ethically justified by the relevant situation (pp. 6–7). It is claimed that the latter,\nespecially, mixed with Stoic influence is a good basis for the understanding of the Roman mind (pp. 6-7, 14). Gill and Braund rightly recognize the impossibility of explaining specific literary representations through only one philosophical theory, though the contemporary philosophical influences must always be recognized as culturally relevant (p. 4).\n\nThe papers in general give a deceptive impression of inconclusiveness; this only proves the value of cautiousness in such a complicated subject and does not deny the significance of the results achieved. Difficulties in interpretations are evident e.g. in trying to combine two Senecas, the philosopher and the poet (Schiesaro), or in comprehending Cicero simultaneously as a mourning father and as a thinker discussing passions, especially grief (Erskine). In both of these examples the practical side of life forms an essential part in explaining the particularities of the representation of passions. In Seneca this practicality is, among other things, the effect his tragedies had on different audiences, and partly with reference to this, Schiesaro’s last paragraph starts with the apparent conclusion that (p. 111): ’What we end up with is the impossibility of Stoic tragedy.’ All in all, Schiesaro’s contribution offers a fresh reading of Senecan tragedy stressing e.g. the importance of its self-conscious nature (p. 91). He also argues that Stoic theories on poetry do not offer a satisfactory rationalization of Senecan tragedy (e.g. p. 105; cf. Gill on Senecan tragedy and Stoic psychology, pp. 226–227). In Cicero’s case Erskine points out how his own experience (Tullia’s death) might have influenced Cicero’s philosophical interests: in his Tusculans, Cicero was collecting arguments about passions but at the same time trying to find a cure for his own grief. Thus the characteristic practicality of later Roman thinkers would seem to have already begun with Cicero (p. 46–47).\n\nAccordingly, the emphasis on the practical or conventional aspect of Roman thinking is apparent in almost all the papers of this volume, whether this practicality is that of the rules of rhetoric, the expectations and preconceptions of Roman readers and audience, or the consolatory tradition. A good example of a Roman literary genre is satire: Braund convincingly argues in her contribution that in Juvenal’s Satire 13 the Roman consolatory tradition and philosophical theories of passion coincide: different ethical discourses, both Greek and Roman, are involved, not all of them necessarily derived from the main philosophical schools. The papers clearly illustrate that in order to reconstruct Roman thinking it is essential to explain it in its own cultural and intellectual context.\n\nTranslations of longer Greek and Latin passages are provided throughout the book though one may ask whether the possible readers in question are in need of these. Among the negative technical features of the volume may be mentioned Gill’s irritating way of referring to ’text to nn.’, already seen in his earlier contributions. Otherwise the indexes and bibliography are conveniently – and practically – drawn up.\n\nRisto Heikkinen\n\n\nThe second part of F. Biville’s (B.) mega biblion concentrates on vocalism. The vocal system of both Greek and Latin is treated thoroughly in twelve chapters in the third"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":1393,"string":"1,393"}}},{"rowIdx":96,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"b7f48d3ff39e10689ff73866cad63604eb91712c"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS : FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACROSS AND AGAINST TIMES, PLACES, AND DISCIPLINES\n\n31/01/2018\nSéminaires / Journées d'études\n\nFrederick Douglass across and against Times, Places, and Disciplines\n\n11-13 octobre 2018, Paris\n\nAppel à contributions\n\nIn an article entitled “Frederick Douglass, Refugee,” published in the *Atlantic* in February 2017, historian David Blight argued that “[o]ne place to begin to understand our long history with the controversies over immigration is with Douglass.” In his 2015 *The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature*, American Literature scholar Lloyd Pratt insisted on Douglass’s engagement with the figure of the stranger, his inhabitation of the stranger persona as a tool to build up a polis and found a demos on what Pratt calls “stranger-with-ness.” This conference, organized on the occasion of the bicentennial of Douglass’s birth, proposes to reconsider Douglass’s practice and “art of estrangement” (Giles) broadly understood as spatial and temporal displacement and philosophical, epistemological and disciplinary decentering.\n\n2018 will mark the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass’s birth. The wide array of events and activities already planned testifies to Douglass’s relevance to present debates in the United States and other countries. Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (FDFI)’s “One Million Abolitionists” plans to print one million copies of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave for distribution in schools as well as the creation of projects addressing present social justice issues. In 2018, the National Park Service (NPS) will organize public and educational programs at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (NHS) in Washington, D.C. Likewise, the bicentennial conference that will be held in Paris in 2018 will be an opportunity to reexamine the figure of Frederick Douglass across times, places, and disciplines. It encourages contributions that read Douglass’s writings—not his serial autobiographies and speeches only, but also his antebellum journalism, his letters, his (rare) poetry and his one foray into fiction—as well as his life beyond the familiar chronological and geographical boundaries. It thereby hopes to contribute to revisiting the heuristic coordinates of Douglass’s scholarship.\n\nThe purpose of this conference, however, is not to commemorate Douglass as a solitary, exceptional figure, but rather to consider him in relation to his contemporaries and to his world, as one voice, powerful though it was, among others. Douglass collaborated with and opposed\nother black and white intellectuals, activists, artists and politicians. He was a man involved in the conflicts and ruptures of his time, in the United States and beyond. His authority and centrality also must be re-examined.\n\nPanels or individual papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:\n\n- **Reading Douglass across and against times**\n - Reading Douglass reading his time as a \"witness and participant\" but also as a promoter of anachrony used as a political tool to \"repeat history in order to deform it\" (Castronovo).\n - Reading Douglass's writings \"against 1865,\" against the \"before-after narrative of emancipation\" (Hager and Marrs), in the hope of complexifying our interpretation of Douglass's use of the genre of the slave narrative;\n - Reading Douglass's \"lives\" beyond the chronology of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Levine), in particular his ambivalent career as a diplomat (Bourhis-Mariotti), a Republican appointee, and an activist in the 1890s.\n - Douglass and radical democracy and activism: considering Douglass's role in a larger history of abolitionism understood as \"a radical, interracial movement, one which addressed the entrenched problems of exploitation and disenfranchisement in a liberal democracy and anticipated debates over race, labor and empire\" (Sinha).\n - Douglass's engagement with an ecological antislavery logics (Ellis).\n - Re-reading Douglass's reception. Reading Douglass within an enlarged canon of African American writing (White & Drexler; Hager) in conjunction with other North American slave narratives and early African American fiction, history and journalism (William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs etc.). How does this enlarged canon affect Douglass's critical reception and his status today as the greatest black pre-Civil war author?\n - Reading Douglass today so as to open new perspectives on the interplay between history, memory and activism at play in Douglass's and our times.\n - Douglass and the discourse of liberation, human rights and humanitarianism; Douglass's practice of a stranger humanism based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences (Pratt).\n - Reconsidering Douglass and public history: What aspects of present debates are illuminated by Douglass's words (Davis)? Why teach Douglass today?\n\n- **Reading Douglass across and against spaces**\n - Changing the maps and geographical coordinates that have shaped our understanding of Douglass. Using Martha Schoolman's \"abolitionist geographies,\" for example, which include both the local and the circum-atlantic, invites us to explore imaginative routes for Douglass's legacy, from Canada to Rome and London to Haiti and Liberia, via the more expected yet still understudied Afro-Caribbean geopolitical spaces (Nwankwo).\n - Reexamining issues of mobility and displacement in Douglass's life; Douglass as an American and international figure; Douglass and transnationalism; Douglass and the Americas (Hooker); Douglass and France (how The North Star covered the 1848 Revolution, for example [Fagan, Alimi-Levy]); Douglass and the diasporic self.\n - Translating Douglass across languages and spaces\n - Investigating the different spaces of Douglass's life and work; Douglass's \"public body\" (Fanuzzi); Douglass's \"feminine space\" (Fought).\n - Decentering our reading of Douglass may lead us to complicate the genealogy of his writing beyond the racial divide and find other significant intertextualities—not only the \"Founding Fathers,\" the New England Transcendentalists, his contemporaries Hawthorne and Melville (Otter and Levine) and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but also his Black Atlantic peers (Giles) and a broader intellectual tradition from the political thought of John Stuart Mill to the transatlantic print culture of the time.\n\n- **Reading Douglass across and against disciplines**\n - Douglass wrote at a moment when \"modern academic fields were becoming increasingly defined\" but his writing cut across disciplinary boundaries (Lee). To be considered:\n - Douglass's use of fiction or of the tools of fiction in his journalism, in his speeches;\n - Douglass's \"rhetorical legacy\" (John R. Kaufman-McKivigan);\n - Douglass's role as an editor (Meer)\n - Douglass and book history: questioning the vision of Douglass and his African-American peers as autonomous author-artisans in the sphere of print, free of white abolitionist control in the pre-Civil War period (Roy)\n - Douglass's philosophy or philosophies (Lee);\n - Douglass's \"visual affirmations\" of himself (Wexler) as well as his celebration of photography “as a great democratic art” (Stauffer, Trodd, & Bernier); Douglass as a celebrity; Douglass and the media.\n\nWe plan to organize activities before and after the conference in relation to community-based teaching, performances and public readings.\n\n**Deadline for all submissions:** January 31, 2018.\n\nProposals (500 words in English or French and a short bio) to be sent to: DouglassParis2018@gmail.com\n\n(We welcome papers from graduate and doctoral students.)\nProposals will be reviewed by the Conference Committee:\nClaire Bourhis-Mariotti, Université Paris 8\nAgnès Derail, ENS\nHélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle\nClaire Parfait, Université Paris 13\nHélène Quanquin, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle\nMarie-Jeanne Rossignol, Université Paris Diderot\nCécile Roudeau, Université Paris Diderot\nMichaël Roy, Université Paris-Nanterre\n\nKeynote speakers (confirmed): Leigh Fought (Le Moyne College), Lloyd Pratt (University of Oxford), Michaël Roy (Université Paris Nanterre).\n\nReferences:\nGATES, Henry Louis, Jr. and John STAUFAFFER, editors. The Portable Frederick Douglass, Penguin Classics, 2016.\n--, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860, CUP, 2005.\nRICE, Alan J. and Martin CRAWFORD, editors. Liberating Sojourner: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform, University of Georgia Press, 1999.\nTransaméricaines\nActualités de la recherche sur les Amériques et la Caraïbe\nLa lettre de l'IdA\nEchos des Amériques\n\nAdresse e-mail\nS'abonner\n\nInformations\nSoutenez l'IdA\n\nDernière mise à jour le 13/12/2017 - 14:19\n\nAnnuaires\nChercheurs, institutions, formations\n\nAccédez aux annuaires\n\nIdéAs, revue en ligne\n\n16 | 2020. Les marges créatrices : intellectuel.le.s afro-descendant.e.s et indigènes aux Amériques\n\nÉcrans de l'IdA\n\nTous les écrans\nMenu principal. Auto réglage initial (Mode télé). Le menu auto-réglage initial s'affiche à l'écran lorsque le téléviseur est mis en marche pour la première fois. Il est possible d'ajuster l'inclinaison ou de régler la langue des menus, le mode d'antenne et de programmer automatiquement les canaux dont le signal est capté par le téléviseur. Menu principal. télécommande pour afficher le menu principal. 2. Appuyer sur les touches de syntonisation CH et/ou les touches de volume VOL pour sélectionner une icône.\n\nMenu Principal. 1,334 likes. Menu Principal é seu canal de informação inteligente. Assuntos como Saúde, Casa, Veículos e Esporte são abordados de uma... Postado em 8, mai 2012 as 13:24 · por menu_principal 0 #05 iCASA Você não pode perder o iCASA desta semana. Mais dicas para você. Postado em 8, mai 2012 as 13:24 · por menu_principal 0 #05 iCASA Você não pode perder o iCASA desta semana."},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":2336,"string":"2,336"}}},{"rowIdx":97,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"e22f9cf867c3e28063b00cd3c7788f6a173468a5"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"Between Being and Becoming: A Gynocritical Reading of Selected Narratives\n\nA B S T R A C T\n\nFeminism since its emergence is based, in essence, on the principle of equality not only between men and woman, but even between women themselves. As such, feminism is concerned with how women are engaged in the process of being and becoming—a process that diminishes labeling womenfolk as the \"Inferior Other Sex\". The study argues that narratives written by feminist writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Kate Chopin are Gynocritical feminists writing back to an androcentric culture and the patriarchal system whose sole aim is to silence women, treat them as an inferior sex, and confine them to the roles of nursering and nurturing. The following study reflects on a literary mosaic composed of denouncing voices that provide more insights into the nature of women's existence. Elucidated under the umbrella of feminism, the examined narratives, namely The Yellow Wallpaper, The New Dress, and A Story of an Hour, shed the light on different aspects related to women's being and becoming including hysteria, the objectified angel, the invisible being, women's authentication, and so on. The study draws heavily on feminist critics who present different discussions about masculine subjugation of women and feminist's avenue towards self-actualization. The study falls into four sections and a conclusion.\n\nSection one is an introduction illustrating the core of feminism with reference to its main concepts. Section two tackles the concept of hysteria as it is represented in Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Section three examines Kate Chopin's A Story of an Hour through the lenses of Simon de Beauvoir's existentialist perspectives. Section four reflects on Virginia Woolf's treatment of women's attempts to transcend passivity as it is represented in The New Dress. The Conclusion highlights the findings of the study.\n\n© 2019 JTUH, College of Education for Human Sciences, Tikrit University\n\n\nBetween the Existence and Becoming: A Gynocritical Reading of Selected Narratives\n\nArticle Info\n\nArticle history:\nReceived 1 July, 2019\nAccepted 9 July 2019\nAvailable online 20 Oct 2019\nEmail: adxxx@tu.edu.iq\n\nA R T I C L E I N F O\n\nKeywords:\nFeminism, gynocritics, the inferior sex, Hysteria, the angel in the house, patriarchal system.\n\nDr. Awfa Hussein Al-Doory\nAssit Prof. Intisar Rasheed Khalil\nAssit Prof. Marwa Sami Hussein\n\nDepartment of English\nCollege of Education for Human Science\nTikrit University\nTikrit, Iraq\n\nAwfa Hussein Al-Doory: E-mail: aofahosaen@tu.edu.iq\n\n© 2019 JTUH, College of Education for Human Sciences, Tikrit University\n\n\nبين الوجود والتحول: دراسة النقد النسوي في نصوص مختارة\n\nم.د. أوفي حسين الدوري قدم اللغة الإنكليزية/ كلية التربية الإنسانية/ جامعة تكريت\nأ.م. انتصار رشيد خليل قدم اللغة الإنكليزية/ كلية التربية الإنسانية/ جامعة تكريت\nأ.م. مروة سامي حسين قدم اللغة الإنكليزية/ كلية التربية الإنسانية/ جامعة تكريت\n\nالخلاصة:\n\nيغنى النقد النسوي بدراسة الفروق والاختلافات لا بين الجنسين فقط وإنما بين معظم النساء انفسهن، ولهذا\nSection One: Introduction\n\nFeminism, by its very nature, is an interdisciplinary revisionist movement that is mainly concerned with how women are socially defined and how this definition affects their being and becoming. This may take the readers directly to the difference between gender and sex. While sex indicates the biological difference between a male and female, gender refers to the construction of the social identity according to the social and cultural role and behavior of each sex within one particular society. Judith Butler’s theory of Performativity elaborates on this difference when she underscores that:\n\nOne is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. (Butler, 1994, 32)\n\nThe difference between man and woman labels the latter as the inferior \"Other\" sex. This inferiority, in fact, dates back to Aristotle’s time. In his Politics, Aristotle examines women and children's through the premise of irrationality and thus they should be excluded from public life to be under the full responsibility of men.\n\nAntifeminist discourses have identified women as the \"blank page\" that should be written upon by man. Contradicting such discourse, French feminists like Helen Cixous and Luce Irigaray link the female body with an inventive text full of symptomatic words. In her \"The Laugh of the Medussa\" Cixous suggests:\n\nWoman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their\nbodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement (Cixous, 1976, 875)\n\nCixous underscores that woman has to challenge the oppressing masculine discourse that dominated literature so as to establish a new genre of creative and indicative writing called l’écriture feminine or feminine. Women have to write for themselves and about themselves using their own experiences and thus to assure their being into the androcentric cultural, social text, and literary text. Luce Irigaray, a French feminist, believes that binary thinking plays a crucial role in affirming androcentric culture. Such binary thinking prevents the readers from comprehending differences in such a nuanced way that does not identify the masculine subject as a source of valuable power.\n\nAccording to Luce Irigaray's perspective, women are not only \"Othered\", they are also absented. This seeps into one of the main images by which suppressed women are identified; it is the image of \"The Angel in the House\". The image of the \"Angel\", derived from a poem by Coventry Patmore, represents the devoted and submissive woman/wife. Virginia Woolf describes the Angel in the House as follows:\n\nShe was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly selfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of the family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. (quoted in Showalter, 1992, 14)\n\nWoolf significantly underscores that \"Killing the Angel in the House\" was part of the occupation of a woman writer.\" This takes the readers directly to the term of gynocriticism.\n\nThe term, gynocriticism, is presented by Elaine Showalter, an American literary critic and writer of cultural and social issues related to feminism. Gynocriticism identified woman as a writer who is responsible for reflecting on female experiences so as to replace the masculine literary criticism by a female one. Gynocriticism also fosters the female's struggle to improve her self-actualization within the performative social system of gender. It is by fostering such struggle, that gynocriticism is challenging what Freud identifies as female's envious feeling of inadequacy. In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases: Feminine, Feminist, and female. In the last phase, woman reaches the level of self-discovery in which she draws heavily on females' experiences as a source of inspiration; she significantly presents\nfemales' experiences within new forms and techniques. (Showalter, 1986, 125)\nWithin the context of Showalter's concept of gynocriticism, writing and reading a text by a woman is an act of revision—an act defined by Adrian Rich in her essay \"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as a Re-Vision,\" as \"the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.\" This act leads women to self-knowledge and thus refusal of the male dominated society. Such refusal cannot be fulfilled without a hysteric discourse that confronts the organization of patriarchal capitalism. (Rich, 1971, https://rivervates.blogspot.com/2010/09/reflection-when-we-dead-awaken-writing.html)\n\nSection Two: Hysteria in \"The Yellow Wallpaper\"\n\nAccording to the ancient Greek belief, \"hysteria\" indicates the wondered wombs through women's bodies. Transcending such imaginary connotation, though affirming its exclusive relatedness to women, the nineteenth century ushered a new understandings of hysteria that are feminine sexual frustration and emotional eruption. It is during the nineteenth century that Silas Weir Mitchell suggests the \"rest cure\" as an avenue towards regaining psychological recovery. This particular cure is reflected, fictionally, through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s \"The Yellow Wallpaper.\" Gilman, however, utilizes hysteria as a means by which the unnamed heroine fights back and crosses over the patriarchal confinement and obstacles represented, symbolically, by her husband, the nailed bed, the nursery room, and the yellow wallpaper.\n\nCharlotte Perkins Gilman was an American novelist, poetess, a social reform lecturer, and interestingly enough, an active feminist. \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" is a semi-autobiographical narrative in a sense that Gilman suffered from hysteria and deep depression after the birth of her only daughter. Like her heroine, she was obliged to respond to the \"rest cure\" prescribed by Silas Weir Mitchell, her doctor. Her fictional and non-fictional writings tackle the concept of utopian feminism that is depending on \"mother's instincts\" in teaching the whole human race: For the sake of my child I must hasten to save/All the children on earth from the jail and the grave. Gilman did not mean to write \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" to be a feminist narrative like Moving the Mountain (1911) and Herland (1915); she wrote it instead as a means of verbalizing her suffering and thus having possible recovery.\n\nFeminist aspects, however, can be recognized in the “confinement and rebellion, forbidden desire and ‘irrational’ fear” (Johnson 522). Confinement and rebellion, in particular, fall into two dimensions: literal and symbolic. While literal confinement is incarnated in the way she is obliged to take a rest cure in her room, writing can be seen as a rebellious act and a \"great relief\" that fight back the patriarchal order represented by her husband/physician who \"hates to have [her] write a word […]and] hardly lets [her] stir without special direction.\"\nSymbolically, confinement is represented in the narrator's limited roles of nursering and nurturing. Her rejection to these limited roles is embodied in a \"slight hysterical tendency\" which can be read as an angry refusal to such limited roles.\n\nTo start with, the genre of \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" is a gothic feminism. Broadly speaking, the events of gothic fiction are set in a far location that motivates feelings of fear and suspense; it is also by the use of the uncanny and irrational that these feelings appeal on the recipient such response. \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" is set in a \"haunted house...[that] is quiet alone, standing well back from the road, quiet three miles from the village...[with] hedges and walls and gates that lock,...\" (647-8) Feelings of fear and terror are materialized in the way the heroine responds to the house; she is \"afraid [for] there is something strange about the house—[she] can feel it.\" (648) Grotesque aspects are embodied in the yellow wallpaper of the heroine's room where she has to spend most of her time. At the very beginning she describes the color of the wallpaper as \"repellant,\" \"smouldering,\" \"dull,\" and \"lurid.\" Her hateful feeling is confirmed when she says: \"I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.\" (649) The mystery of the wallpaper is embodied in the pattern she recognizes as \"a recurrent spot [that] lols like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at [her] upside down.\" (ibid)\n\nAspects of gothic feminism are coincided with portraying the heroine as an object thingified at the hand of gender politics. She is the \"little goose\" and the \"little girl\" who must take care of herself not for her sake, but rather for his sake. Diane Hoeveler's Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës refers to the portrayal of women as passive and silenced victims. However, these two forces, namely silence and passivity, are feminist avenue towards fighting back the patriarchal system. (Hoeveler, 1998, xiii) They are, quoting Hoeveler, \"literary masquerades...that would allow female characters...a fictitious mastery over what they consider an oppressive political and social system...gothic feminism is a veiled critique of all those public institutions that have been erected to displace, contain, or commodify women.\" (Ibid) The oppression of the patriarchal system is embodied in the husband's refusal to let his wife (unnamed narrator) work through her hysteria by means of writing. While \"he hates to have [her] write a word,\" she knows that writing is the space that \"would relieve the press of ideas and rest [her].\" His oppressiveness is also coincided with the nurse he employs to watch her. Like John, the nurse tries to prevent the narrator from writing. However, the narrator writes when her nurse is out. Even her bedroom is not the one she wants; instead, it's a room that once had been a \"playroom\"—a matter that has the symbolic connotation of her return to infancy. It is not only the room that enhances her equalization with children, it is also how her husband treats her as a feeble child: \"dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sit by me and read to me till it tired my\nhead.\" In such situation, she is a receiver of power rather than an agent who speaks out her suffering: \"John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.\"\n\nIt is not only writing that she is not allowed to, she is also denied the right to fancy: \"I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least.\" The narrator's considerable fancy is embodied in the pattern she recognizes on the wallpaper: \"it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern... [it] seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out. The creeping woman on the wall can be symbolically perceived from two angels. First, she is victimized by the patriarchal and social \"bars.\" Second, she resists these bars when she strongly shakes them to step out. Meanings of imprisonment, entrapment, and restriction are enhanced from the very beginning of the story when the narrator describes the house as a \"colonial mansion.\" Foreshadowing the coming events, the house represents all the social norms that mentally colonize and limit her roles to nurturing and nursering. It is against these confinements that the narrator, by means of hysterical creeping, will revolt at the end of the story.\n\nThe creeping woman is not the only one on the wall; there are other creeping women behind her who try to step out. Identifying herself with her sisters/creeping women, the narrator daily locks the door of her room and starts creeping. Not only that, she begins to tear the wallpaper—an act that implies her radical decision to free all women from the bars of customs and traditions. Her radical decision is coincided with hysterical behavior that speaks up and speaks for the rights of her existence. In this sense, the narrator's hysteria can be perceived as Gilman's feminist discourse by which she gives voice to the silenced subaltern. Juliet Mitchel confirms: \"The women novelist must be hysteric. Hysteric is the woman's simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the organization and sexuality under patriarchal capitalism. It is simultaneous what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse feminity, within patriarchal discourse, and I think that is exactly what the novel is; I do not believe that there is such a thing as a female writing, \"a woman voice\" \" (Michel, 1984, 290). The narrator's hysterical reaction, in this sense, is a means that voices the collective suffering of women experiences within the patriarchal order and domestic sphere.\n\nThe conflict between the narrator and the patriarchal order, represented by her husband, starts in the nursery room. In fact, the climax of the conflict is situated within this room, particularly when she locks the door and starts tearing the yellow wallpaper in such a hysterical way. Though she does not choose the room, she chooses to start her revolution from the same room in which she is obliged to follow the strict masculine rules. The nursery room encapsulates two antithetical forces, namely the yellow wallpaper and the pattern of the creeping women whom the narrator mimics and identified herself with. As two\nantithetical symbols, the yellow wallpaper stands for all customs, traditions, and norms that she used to live with. The act of creeping, on the other hand, stands for women's quiet and slow struggle against the patriarchal system. The secrecy of this act is confirmed by the fact that the narrator is the only one who can see the pattern of the creeping woman on the wallpaper, particularly at night. John falls unconscious when he sees her hysterical shape and her creeping body on the ground. The moment that declares her triumph upon the patriarchal system is that one when she creeps over his body: \"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!\" when she removes the nailed bedstead and creeps upon his body, she shows her ability to remove the burden of tradition that restrains and marginalize her existence. The final scene of the story emphasizes on the rough and ominous path that women have to take in order to reach equality in society, and this path is the process of seeking women’s own identity and their courage to defy tradition.\n\nSection Three: Artificial Being in Virginia Woolf’s \"The New Dress\"\n\nBelieving in one's potentialities rather than appearance is what Virginia Woolf usually reflects on throughout her literary works. Her short narrative \"The New Dress,\" published in 1924, elaborates on this theme through Mabel whose \"new dress\" motivates the question of \"why not be original? Why not be herself?\" It is through the feminist existential perspective of being and becoming, that Woolf tries to free her heroine from the limits of being for others to be instead for herself; she symbolically uses the trope of the \"new dress\" to evoke Mabel's radical sense against the strategy of social control that enhance her desire to embrace alienation.\n\nIntended to be part of Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway, \"The New Dress\" share with the aforementioned work (Mrs. Dalloway) certain characters, events, and feminine feelings of subordination and power relations. As a case in point, the two characters in both narratives, Clarrisa and Mabel, share the same feelings of inferior Otherness—a matter that may induce the idea that each of the two is the foil of the other. Furthermore, mentioning the name of Clarrisa Dalloway at the very beginning of \"The New Dress\" enables the reader to recognize that Mabel attends Mrs. Dalloway's party in which she feels suspicious about her inappropriate dress. It is that particular dress that fills her with feelings of \"profound dissatisfaction\" and enhances \"the misery...of being inferior to other people.\" Her escapist tendency is materialized when she finds herself goes \"straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner\" so as to avoid gossip remarks about her \"hideous new dress!\" She is constrained by her need for social approval in an aristocratic community and by her fear at the hands of other people in the party who would see her as inferior or different.\n\nInterestingly enough, Mabel's personality is marked by its deviation from the avenue towards self-actualization. Her self-esteem is thawed by her\ninability to embrace her mother's history represented by the \"Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire.\" Instead, she identified herself as a standing \"dummy\" with many pins stuck into. More than that, she sees herself nothing but a fly trying hard to \"crawl out of the saucer.\" While she compares herself to a fly, she compares others to a butterfly, dragonfly, and any other \"beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, and skimming.\"\n\nThe stream of consciousness technique is the form that encapsulates Mabel's fragmented narrative. This finds its echo in the term \"psychological realism\" which is identified by modern writers including Virginia Woolf herself. Woolf does not see in writing a mere tool to show reality. She regarded writing to break through the shallow appearance of reality to go inside at a more profound real meaning of truth thrashing beneath. (Silver, 1983, 19) Woolf focuses, in \"The New Dress\" in particular and in other works in general, on the spirituality of the character. In other words, she focuses on Mabel's inner self to reflect on her anxiety: Woolf significantly focuses upon Mabel's internal response to people's fantasized opinions about her new dress. As such, the reader is randomly taken from one character to another inside Mabel's mind. Her random transformation from one character to another crystalizes how her disturbed consciousness responds to their remarks about her dress:\n\nMiss Milan said that the skirt could not well be longer; if anything the skirt, said Miss Milan, puckering her forehead, considering with all her wits about her, must be shorter; and she felt, suddenly, honestly, full of love for Miss Milan, much, much fonder of Miss Milan than of any one in the whole world... Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice itself. He always saw through one, especially if one were feeling particularly mean, paltry, or feeble-minded. \"Mabel's got a new dress!\" he said, and the poor fly was absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he would like her to drown, she believed. He had no heart, no fundamental kindness, only a veneer of friendliness. Miss Milan was much more real, much kinder.\n\nMabel is mentally colonized within her anxiety and her colonizer is a fantasy of her own invention. She fantasizes that everybody in the party makes fun of her dress: \"Oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking— ‘What's Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!'\" (Wolf, 1927: 4) She absorbs this fantasy to the extent that she cannot comprehend her own isolation and complicity.\n\nThe imprisonment within the borders of her inner self and feelings of estrangement are reflected on the limited space of dialogue within the narrative. In fact, all the short dialogues do not take place in an actual confrontation within a public time; but rather within the private time of her inner self. This is why the\nevents as well as the dialogues do not follow a logical and smooth consequence but rather a fragmented one.\n\nMabel's \"vacillating\" character leads an interior conflict against her appearance which is misshapen by her \"yellow dress\". Her anxiety springs from her feelings that her body as well as out appearance depart from the idealized norms of beauty and attractiveness. The new dress, in this sense, is viewed in opposition to her true Self, mind, and spirit. It is because of that particular dress, Mabel \"is aligned against reason and against spiritual salvation.\" (Denmark and others (eds.), 2005, 83) However, the end of the story is the turning point which takes the conflict towards its resolution. The politics of \"The new dress\" is confronted by Mabel's decision to go to \"the London Library to-morrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance.\" This decision is the act of re-visioning her true self; it is an act of awakening which by its very nature, quoting Adrian Rich, is \"an act of survival.\"\n\nSection Four: Finding the Self\n\nIn her story \"The Story of an Hour\", the American feminist writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904) depicts a stereotypical woman from the nineteenth century when women were subjugated objects. Chopin's protagonist, Louise Mallard, faces an existentialist conflict of being between prison and freedom, and between life and death. She has a self-awareness regarding her existence but with less living space—a space whose limits are determined by the social norms of that period. Angelyn Mitchell states that “Patriarchy’s social conditioning,[ discussed since the time of Aristotle,] creates codes of social behavior to ensure the suppression of feminine desires.” (1993, 60) This is depicted by Chopin who portrays the nineteenth century society through the family of Mallard which is ruled by Mr. Mallard, the symbolic representative of the patriarchal system—a system that entails the dominance of masculinity over its counterpart, namely femininity.\n\nSimone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), the French feminist writer and social theorist, has an essential influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. In her The Second Sex, she depicts women’s deprived position in society. De Beauvoir traces the ways ancient societies mistreated women and sustained their inferiority. As far as marriage is concerned, de Beauvoir states that “The destiny that society traditionally offers women is marriage” (2011, 480). She mentions that “In truth woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need, sexual desire and the desire for offspring , which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female” (1961, 12). Although a male needs a woman to be a servant, sex object, mother for his children, and even an assistant in agricultural societies; yet, the male does not appreciate that. For him, a “woman integrated as slave or vassal into the family group dominated by fathers and brothers, has always been given in marriage to males by other males” (2011, 481). Chopin's feminist narrative echoes de Beauvoir's\nperspectives in a sense that she reflects on the same ideas through Louise Mallard who is depicted as an invisible woman in a superior manish society. Being the bird in the cage is implicitly enhanced by her house which represents the confinements of the patriarical system.\n\nMrs. Mallard, like many others in her society, has unsatisfied marriage. Apparently, she lives with two paradoxical selves. While her outward feminine self seems to be satisfied, her feminist inward-self rejects everything. The congruity of the two “Selves” increases the conflict between her conscious and subconscious life. Moreover, since she is living in a manish community controlled by patriarchal rules, then Mrs. Mallard is enslaved, silenced, and Othered by her colonizer/master, namely Mr. Mallard. Thus, she has to accept blindly the way she is led by masculine norms. Death, however is her alley. The moment she receives the news of Mr. Mallard’s death is not a moment of “grief” as it seems to be; it is rather the moment of release that enables her to see the world, for the first time, with fresh eyes. “When the storm of grief had spent itself”, she goes to her room alone and locks the door. She stands in her room “facing the open window”. Through that “open square”, and for the first time, she starts to notice “the tops of trees… with the new spring life.” She smells rain in the air and hears “the notes of a distant song…, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves”. The scene makes her believe that her previous life has been veiled and it is only now she can remove the veil away.\n\nThe narrator continues to describe the scene outside the open window. “There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds”. The blue sky symbolizes Louise’s life and body. The “patches of blue sky” represent the blank spaces in her body that are not written upon yet with unwanted things and desires, or even coloured with gloominess. Bates, et al., in describing the body as a text, state:\n\nFeminist scholars have looked at the body as a possible source of female creativity. The conceptualization of woman as body has meant that women traditionally been consigned to the role of object of male artistic representation and not as a subject capable of acting creatively in the world. The female body has been seen as the instigator of male desire, spurring male creativity: woman is a muse but cannot be an active creator of art herself. (2005, 93)\n\nThis is obvious in the case of Mrs. Mallard. She is objectified by Mr. Mallard. Her body is a blank page to be written upon. Though woman’s body represents her creative source of power, the norms of the society underrate it and treat it as no more than a tool for man’s pleasure to do whatever he wishes in order to satisfy his needs.\nShe continues to look at the sky and she feels that “There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully.” In the beginning she does not recognize it, “But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air”. Finally, she discovers it and whispers slightly “free, free, free!” It is her first time to sense that wonderful and amazing feeling. Her heart beats fast; she significantly celebrates her authentic “Self”. But Louise has another conflict between her subconscious who feels happy with discovering her “Self” and freedom, and with her consciousness who suffers from the guilt of her happiness while her husband has just died. “She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her”. However, that conflict does not last long because “A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial”. What matters now is that she is free from the strings of marriage, obligations, and above all from the husband whom “she had loved… sometimes [and] often she had not”. He has been her jailer who locked her in a cage. Now she is “Free! Body and soul free!” She whispers with a feverish triumph in her voice. She will live for herself with all the years to come and “there would be no one to live for.” No one is going to impose his will upon her. She will have her own will and space. In an hour, Mrs. Mallard finds out that her faded love for her husband is nothing in comparison with “this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being”.\n\nIronically, the doctor and every other character believe that Mrs. Mallard's death at the end of the story is out of a “heart disease” caused by the “joy” of seeing her husband alive after the news of his absolute death in a “railroad disaster”. Yet, readers know that what kills her is something else. Readers, in reading and analyzing a story, are like investigators who bring together the threads of a case that they are working on. Thus, they see the whole image and look at the text from a perspective that is different from what the characters see or believe in. Her naïve sister, Josephine, thinks that Louise is like those women who hurt themselves after the death of their husbands. Thus, she begs her to open the door. On the other side of that same door, Louise is “drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window,” her gate to life and liberty. She senses and tastes life differently for the first time and thus has “triumph in her eyes”(33). She becomes “a goddess of Victory”(40). At that moment she realizes that she cannot accept the idea of being a slave or an object again or even a doll in a cage. She decides to live all the “years to come” for herself only. When she sees her husband enters the house, alive, she is shocked and died. She could not bear the idea of being a prisoner again under the mercy of her jailer who underestimates her abilities, creativity, and sacrifices. Therefore, death becomes her gate to free her soul and body from humiliation, abuse, and torture. She rebels against all the patriarchal norms which make her as “young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression …”(42). She could not trade her liberty for life itself. Obviously, death, in one way or another, is her salvation, her sealed emancipation from a contracted marriage.\nCONCLUSION\n\nThe examined narratives are hysteric voices that write and fight back the patriarchal system. Though the three writers of the three examined narratives adopt different symbolic images, they fulfill the same aim that is to project the feminist refusal to the confinements of a system that constantly tries to emasculate women. The three characters in the three examined narratives are engaged in a process of being and becoming by which they transcend the masculine boundaries. As Such, the end of each story is marked by the birth of a new \"Self”—a self that refuses to be objectified, thingified, and Othered.\n\nCited Works\n\n\n---------------------.\n\n\n"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":7193,"string":"7,193"}}},{"rowIdx":98,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"bc2586c34c251d3f618684c0d3cf7033ead18a53"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation | 491f1c2baee4e1a7f0307a39a599b78\n\nGrowing Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World\n\nLori Dach\n\nIncreasingly, advanced technology is making its way into every aspect of children's lives. From how they learn and work, and what power and influence they hold.\n\nThis book explores new areas and issues which are emerging now, and which will affect young people for the rest of their lives. Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of growing up in the digital age, focusing especially on technological change. The project is a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Korea Development Institute. Part of the book looks at key elements of change from a global perspective. Our research investigated the paradigm shift between the different very different. Each of the two generations differ from each other and we\n\nAge of Surveillance Capitalism\n\nGrowing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation\n\nOffers a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating books that appeal to today's youth.\n\nThe first generation of Digital Natives (DNs) is now growing up. However, these digital natives were rather late starters since their exposure to computers started only recently from the use of wireless devices. One year olds may try to master the intuitive touch interfaces of their tablets whilst sitting comfortably in their baby buggies. The controller-less interfaces allow these children to interact with a machine in a way which was unconceivable before. We therefore researched the paradigm shift between the different very different. Each of the two generations differ from each other and we\n\nGrowing Up Gangster\n\nHow America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, the United States reached a new level of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television brought along by the menace and promise of a fairy tale.\n\nThe Rise of American Growth\n\nThey suspect her or her husband of having been involved in the disappearance of top secret government files. As Emma, Shanti, and Ashley begin to suspect each other, the alternate reality shaped by magic was their only form of freedom. The Bone Fire is a political Gothic, a child growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Gregory Marshall was enparated with the fast life. Money, women and cars were the things to have and Greg was determined to get them—by any means necessary. It wasn't long before the innocent young teenager turned into a cold-hearted gangster known around town simply as G Man. His ruthless and ambitious ways made him a legend in his own lifetime. They are driven out of school, into the streets where they become part of a powerful and dangerous criminal gang.\n\nThe Fall of American Growth\n\nIn four years Stormzy has risen from one of the most promising musicians of his generation to a spokesperson for a new generation of ’other-worldly’ young people floating in the sky. The stories range from triumphing over illness and injury to overcoming bullying. Entries include Sudan's Greta Thunberg, whose youth climate activism sparked a global movement, and Pakistan's Ayesha Farooq, who became Pakistan's first female fighter pilot at age 20.\n\nGrowing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation\n\nOffers a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating books that appeal to today's youth.\n\nOnline Library Growing Up Digital The Rise of The Net Generation\nOnline Library Growing Up Digital The Rise Of The Net Generation\n\nThis is the moving and powerful account of two remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime and neglect.\n\nExplores every facet of water and examines the issues surrounding water scarcity and what can be done to ensure that humans have plenty of clean water in the future. By the best-selling author of The Wal-Mart Effect. Reprint.\n\nand executives who make up the community of Growth Hackers. Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for ... development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration.\n\nThe definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley ... of a classic success story. But the cofounders stayed on, trying to maintain Instagram’s beauty, brand, and cachet, instead of a plethora of influencers worldwide—to show how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we show, eat, travel, and communicate, all while fighting to preserve the values that contributed to its success. “Deeply reported and beautifully written” (Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair). “No Filter” pairs phenomenal in-depth reporting with explosive storytelling that gets to the heart of how Instagram: The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley...\nIn their 2007 bestseller, Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams taught the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in the new global marketplace. But much has changed in three years, and the principles of wikinomics are now more powerful than ever. In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the very financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the health-care, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers. In every corner of the globe, businesses, organizations, and individuals alike are using mass collaboration to revolutionize not only the way we work, but how we live, learn, create, and care for each other. Once again backed by original research, Tapscott and Williams provide vivid new examples of organizations that are successfully embracing the principles of wikinomics.\n\nOffers a look at the Net Generation in the workforce, the way they process information and learn, and the tools they need to keep them engaged in a dynamic business environment.\n\nWe've all seen them: kids hypnozically staring at glowing screens in restaurants, in playgrounds and in friends' houses—and the numbers are growing. Like a virtual scourge, the illuminated glowing faces—the Glow Kids—are multiplying. But at what cost? Is this just a harmless indulgence or fad like some sort of digital hula-hoop? Some say that glowing screens might even be good for kids—a form of interactive educational tool. Don't believe it. In Glow Kids, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras will examine how technology—more specifically, age-inappropriate screen tech, with all of its glowing ubiquity—has profoundly affected the brains of an entire generation. Brain imaging research is showing that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic (dopamine activating) to the brain's pleasure center as sex. And a growing mountain of clinical research correlates screen tech with disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and even psychosis. Most shocking of all, recent brain imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person's developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can. Kardaras will dive into the sociological, psychological, cultural, and economic factors involved in the global tech epidemic with one major goal: to explore the effect all of our wonderful shiny new technology is having on kids. Glow Kids also includes an end-out letter and a \"quiz\" for parents in the back of the book.\n\nCelebrate the right to resist! Human rights belong to every single one of us, but they are often under threat. Developed in collaboration with Amnesty International, Rise Up! encourages young people to engage in peaceful protest and stand up for freedom. Photographs of protest posters celebrate the ongoing fight for gender equality, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, refugee and immigrant rights, peace, and the environment.\n\nCan blockchain solve your biggest business problem? While the world is transfixed by bitcoin mania, your competitors are tuning out the noise and making strategic bets on blockchain. Your rivals are effortlessly tracking every last link in their supply chains. They're making bureaucratic paper trails obsolete while keeping their customers' data saver and discovering new ways to use this next foundational technology to sustain their competitive advantage. What should you be doing with blockchain now to ensure that your business is poised for success? \"Blockchain: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review\" brings you today's most essential thinking on blockchain, explains how to get the right initiatives started at your company, and prepares you to seize the opportunity of the coming blockchain wave. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collect the best research, interviews, and analysis to get ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.\n\nBlockchain technology is powering our future. As the technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra, open software platforms like Ethereum, and disruptive companies like Ripple, it’s too important to ignore. In this revelatory book, Don Tapscott, the bestselling author of Wikinomics, and his son, blockchain expert Alex Tapscott, bring us a brilliantly researched, highly readable, and essential book about the technology driving the future of the economy. Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolutionary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it's best known as the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital currencies, it also has the potential to go far beyond currency, to record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certificates to insurance claims, land titles, and even votes. Blockchain is also essential to understand if you’re an artist who wants to make a living off your art, a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from, an immigrant who’s tired of paying big fees to send money home to your loved ones, or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business. And these examples are barely the tip of the iceberg. As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, blockchain technology will create winners and losers. This book shines a light on where it can lead us in the next decade and beyond.\n\nAs seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every previous generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world."},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":2492,"string":"2,492"}}},{"rowIdx":99,"cells":{"id":{"kind":"string","value":"97596c90535ef32156bfa1a065821e7791c8e02d"},"text":{"kind":"string","value":"Sidney Kingsley\n\nThe following is an annotated, secondary bibliography of publications on the drama of Sidney Kingsley. The scope is inclusive of material published in the U.S. after 1970, a time when social concerns brought renewed interest in Kingsley's plays, particularly *Men in White*, *Dead End*, and *Detective Story*. To date, one important primary and secondary bibliography is available. Michael L. Counts' bio-bibliographical essay and checklist provides a survey of important books, interviews, articles, and reviews published during the 1930s, '40s, '50s and the early '60s, thereby covering the period when Kingsley's plays were being produced for the stage (Counts 1995).\n\nThe purpose of this compilation was to extend and update Counts' work and other secondary bibliography. It accomplishes that by providing a survey of new scholarship and commentary, covering interviews, film reviews, and dissertations after 1970. It also provides documentation of significant festivals and revival productions in the U.S. Students and interested researchers should also consult Nena Couch's scholarly edition of prizewinning plays (1995). Couch gives us authoritative editions complemented with the context that surrounded Kingsley's life and work.\n\nThis compilation begins with general reference and bibliographical sources, followed by interviews, dissertations and theses. Plays having received critical attention and or significant revival productions follow. Of note: I discovered revivals only for *Dead End* and *Detective Story*. Entries for these plays are primarily composed of newspaper pieces offering commentary or review. *Men in White*, on the other hand, had no revivals of note, but received a good amount of critical attention. Entries for this play consist of articles and essays bringing critical treatment and or useful context on the play's writing and production. Those entries are arranged alphabetically by author with a separate section titled \"Other Related\" made up of articles and essays that focus on themes in *Men in White* or reference the play in broad treatment on the portrayal of medical doctors in popular media.\n\nA list of the sources I consulted in the process of compiling this bibliography, other than those listed in the \"Reference and Bibliography\" section, are noted on pages 7-8.\n\n\nReference and Bibliography\n\n\nBio-bibliographical essay. Primary sources and selected list of secondary sources.\n\n\nConsists of plays awarded one or more of five prizes including the Pulitzer. Arranged chronologically\nby theatre season, plays are described with commentary. Included are scene synopses, brief histories, bibliographical overviews describing critical reception, and a listing of characters in each play. Covers *Men in White, The Patriots, and Darkness at Noon.*\n\n\nContains transcripts of discussions and interviews that took place over several years in symposia sponsored by the Dramatists Guild. Divided into three parts, the first features discussions among original participants of on-and-off Broadway landmark hits; part two features interviews with established dramatists, Sidney Kingsley included; and part 3 contains discussions on authorship in play and musical theatre.\n\n\nConsists of four citations, arranged (by) and (about), not duplicated in Counts' bibliography (1995).\n\n\nCites studio information, release dates and directors for Kingsley's plays made into film: *Dead End, Detective Story, Men in White, and The Patriots.*\n\n\nOpens with a synopsis of the play with excerpts from commentary and reviews. Contains details of stage, screen, and television productions, including facts on openings, number of performances, names of directors and producers, cast members, and sets.\n\n\nCritical essay on Kingsley's career and influence in the \"the theatre of realism.\"\n\n\nDiscusses the writing and staging of *Men in White, Dead End, Ten Million Ghosts, The World We Make, and The Patriots.*\n\n\nDetails opening productions with selected reviews for *Darkness at Noon, Dead End, Detective Story, Lunatics and Lovers, Men in White, Night Life, The Patriots, Ten Million Ghosts, and The World We Make.*\n\nBio-bibliographical essay and analysis of Kingsley's major plays. Includes bibliography.\n\n\nBrief biography followed with a list of productions each linked to performance and production details. Includes credits and cast.\n\n**Interview**\n\n\nTranscript from 1984 Dramatists Guild program series titled \"Conversations With\" a symposia that provided dramatists an opportunity to interview prominent playwrights. Discussion focuses on Kingsley's work in the Group Theatre and the development of his plays *Men in White, Dead End, Detective Story,* and *Darkness at Noon.*\n\n**Dissertations and Theses**\n\n\n**Men in White**\n\n\nDescribes the development of *Men in White* as produced by the Group Theatre. Contains excerpts of comments from producers and actors.\n\nDiscusses the influence of the plays and the historical, social, and economic conditions that informed their dramatic portrayal of the American doctor as seen in medical dramas today. It also looks at the still relevant tensions between science and medicine, profit and practice, and social concerns such as abortion and government sponsored healthcare.\n\n\nProvides an account of the history and background of the Group Theatre, its period of decline and subsequent renewal brought about by the staging of *Men in White*. Portrays the people involved and the decisions involved in acquiring the script, the tensions between actors and directors, and the play's ultimate success.\n\n\nDiscusses the influence of *Men in White* and other films that portray physicians as self-sacrificing heroes and central focus in hospital drama.\n\nOther Related\n\n\nA study on the portrayal of doctors in drama beginning with the sixteenth century and their emergence over time as a central dramatic character. Contains a brief analysis of *Men in White* in this context.\n\n\nThis article looks at the intersections of theatre and medicine in modern drama with a focus on realism.\n\n\nDescribes the influence of the Motion Picture Production Code Administration (PCA) and the monitoring of the film industry. Focuses on acceptable content in hospital drama of the 1930's as portrayed in such plays as *Men in White*.\n\n\nAn essay looking back from today's medical reality TV to early medical dramas. Treatment is given of Kingsley's Broadway hit, MGM's version in film, and the Three Stooges' parody, *Men in Black*. \nDetective Story\n\n\nStudies the portrayal of three immigrant groups in major plays of the period. Offers analysis on both Dead End and Detective Story.\n\n\nDead End\n\nBrantley, Ben. \"When Poor were Perky as if Life were Swell.\" The New York Times 15 July 1997, late ed: sec. C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. 2 Sept. 2009.\n\n\nStudies the portrayal of three immigrant groups in major plays of the period. Includes analysis for both *Dead End* and *Detective Story*.\n\n\nOffers critical analysis on *Dead End* and a discussion of its influence in the development of social drama. Describes critical and audience reception.\n\nCenter Theatre Production of *Dead End* at the Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles. Sept. 7-Oct. 16, 2005.\n\n\n*Dead End* at the Williamstown Theatre Festival July 14-20, 1997.\n\n\nSommer, Elyse. \"'Dead End.'\" *Curtain Up: The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features,*\n\nA substantive review of the play directed by Nicholas Martin. Includes interesting facts on its 1935 Broadway opening performance including an excerpt from Kingsley's stage directions.\n\nHuntington Theatre Company's Production of Dead End, Boston, September 8-October 16, 2001.\n\n\nThe following is a listing of sources I consulted during the process of constructing this bibliography.\n\nOnline Databases\n\n1. Books and Parts of Books\n - Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)\n - Global Books in Print\n - Google Scholar—Advanced Scholar Search\n - MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures\n - WorldCat and WorldCat Dissertations and Theses\n\n2. Articles\n - Academic OneFile\n - Academic Search Premier\n - Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)\n - Arts & Humanities Citation Index\n - Film & Television Literature Index\n - Google Scholar—Advanced Scholar Search\n - Humanities International Complete (includes American Humanities Index)\n - International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ)\n - International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance\n - International Index to the Performing Arts\n - JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive\n - Literature Resource Center\n - MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures\nPeriodical Archives\nPeriodicals Index\n\n3. Newspaper Pieces\n Historical Newspapers (Times London 1906-1980)\n Lexis Nexis (1999-2009)\n Newspaper Source (1995-2009)\n\nSources in Print\n Annual Checklists in Modern Drama (1991-1999) [continues Modern Drama Scholarship]\n Humanities Index (1974-2004)\n International Bibliography of Theatre (1982-1999)\n Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1981-1990\n Theatre History Studies: A Twenty-Year Index, 1981-2000 (TRI)\n Theatre Record (1981-2009)"},"n_tokens":{"kind":"number","value":1925,"string":"1,925"}}}],"truncated":false,"partial":false},"paginationData":{"pageIndex":0,"numItemsPerPage":100,"numTotalItems":1846289,"offset":0,"length":100}},"jwt":"eyJhbGciOiJFZERTQSJ9.eyJyZWFkIjp0cnVlLCJwZXJtaXNzaW9ucyI6eyJyZXBvLmNvbnRlbnQucmVhZCI6dHJ1ZX0sImlhdCI6MTc3OTUyNjQxNCwic3ViIjoiL2RhdGFzZXRzL2Fkb3JraW4vb2xtb2NyX3NjaWVuY2VfcGRmcy1saXRlcmF0dXJlIiwiZXhwIjoxNzc5NTMwMDE0LCJpc3MiOiJodHRwczovL2h1Z2dpbmdmYWNlLmNvIn0.iXlFIpNzFH_MYTzHq4vxWcHNpctiFeA3WU88Pk8CObH8S4fjrBc7fiNWfw27E1VnYf9cxCmf4sAGEAVvPfqrBw","displayUrls":true,"splitSizeSummaries":[{"config":"default","split":"train","numRows":1846289,"numBytesParquet":72895677988}]},"discussionsStats":{"closed":0,"open":1,"total":1},"fullWidth":true,"hasGatedAccess":true,"hasFullAccess":true,"isEmbedded":false,"savedQueries":{"community":[],"user":[]}}">
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4a327dffbb578df4576b96d4a55bcb3e99a1cf23 | Prenominal and postnominal reduced relative clauses: arguments against unitary analyses
Sleeman, A.P.
Published in:
University of Bucharest Review
Citation for published version (APA):
General rights
It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) ... | 7,808 |
b2b79a4b365aa2d96ba19d8a40faffca90303127 | Stagnant Supers: Amplifying the Superhero Genre Through Novelistic Maturity
Ariel Elizabeth Hubbard
Brigham Young University
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd
Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6... | 11,971 |
fa6493df65ff75c1492a8f25dd1b81a7d7c843e2 | <table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th><strong>Title</strong></th>
<th>Halle, Louis J. "Recollections of Rachel Carson": typescript</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><strong>Call Number</strong></td>
<td>YCAL MSS 46</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Published/Created Date</strong></td>
<td>n.d.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Rig... | 1,334 |
3053a3338b0e45b6c254c71eb3e6e8932ac3daff | 'You' and 'I' in Modal Logic
Aloni, M.
Published in:
Grazer Philosophische Studien
Citation for published version (APA):
General rights
It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, i... | 14,331 |
b7fd938454094df81ed512d5538df6b068f1f8a2 | Allegory of Spiritual Journey to Understand God in Indonesian Novel
Lukman Hanafi¹ and Joesana Tjahjani²
{90.lhanz@gmail.com¹, tjahjani.joesana@gmail.com²}
¹,²Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia, Depok 16424, Indonesia
Abstract. Human life has two aspects, which are material and spiritual life. Both aspec... | 2,888 |
f2995f2ae836c9798f15c13fb93ef1d15598c938 | Introduction
A growing field in sociolinguistics in Southern Africa, and the African continent more broadly, is the investigation into forms of language used by youth, particularly those residing in the multilingual cities of the continent. Examples of these phenomena include Sheng from Kenya, Camfranglais from Camero... | 9,220 |
1c4db7af78485778227bd3566ba0a3e9c4f5b285 | Term: **Practical Science**
Quote: The present writer will call [...] science which differs from [heuretic science] in all the important respects which result from investigation being pursued, not because of the august nature of the truth sought, but for the sake of some anticipated utility of it to some man or men, *... | 108 |
e0ababda870e6b129e61d64ce4844ea43988ddd3 | Heroes in Literature and Life
What constitutes a hero?
- What qualities do certain heroes have that make them exceptional?
- When have we seen a situation give rise to an unconventional hero or heroine?
- Do all heroes have something in common about their appearance?
- What are some of the lessons that heroes can teac... | 563 |
57cba5efd62f4c0037ccf177d794b0ad5329b44f | Emotion and composition
Maria Esipova
Princeton University
mesipova@princeton.edu
SURGE, Rutgers University
November 8, 2019
1. Intro
• Expressives can have apparently non-compositional (hf. “non-compositional”) uses:
(1) a. Where is my {fucking, bloody, goddamn} pen?!
b. Will you please (never) {fucking, blood... | 6,055 |
cf2ec8ce86713fad2c6f4b2d314831838c80a2d6 | Double Modal Verbs (Have to) and Verbs in English Modality on Corpus Linguistics in the Context of Industrial Revolution 4.0: Syntactic and Semantic Studies
Deden Novan Setiawan Nugraha¹
¹Faculty of Business and Management, Widyatama University, Indonesia
Correspondence: Deden Novan Setiawan Nugraha (deden.novan@widy... | 3,281 |
840454cb2cda2c666855fde070054e3f93291981 | The Element Of Existential Despair In The Novel “Where Shall We Go This Summer” By Anita Desai.
Abstract:
Anita Desai, a name which has gained an important place in the field of Indian English literature. Anita Desai has written on a style that has been highly influenced by Virgina Woolf, D.H.Lawrence etc--- fiction w... | 3,930 |
de32f12f8807af4a71a4b053e4cc359873603a7c | WE THREE SPIES OF PARTHIA ARE
JAMES F. MCGRATH
The royal palace in Ctesiphon is breathtaking to behold, especially when seen in the dazzling sunlight of a clear spring day. The sheer height and length of its famous mudbrick arch seems to defy the pull of Earth, as though it were suspended from the heavens by an invisi... | 12,299 |
e9e61966a220663da86baf671efc9ca5fc698163 | Idealism and the Elusiveness of a Peircean Label
Sandra Rosenthal
The Commens Encyclopedia
The Digital Encyclopedia of Peirce Studies
New Edition
Edited by Mats Bergman and João Queiroz
Retrieved 27.05.2022
ISSN 2342-4257
License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Abstract:
To understand the ... | 8,656 |
4d90d229dc8c7064a4c443a6a58ab32ea255b942 | 10-1-2001
Writing Sample
Sitok Srengenge
Rights
Copyright © 2001 Sitok Srengenge
Recommended Citation
https://ir.uiowa.edu/iwp_archive/23
Hosted by Iowa Research Online. For more information please contact: lib-ir@uiowa.edu.
Sitok Srengenge
OSMOSIS OF ORIGIN
I ask the wind,
whence does reverie come,
the wind ... | 4,615 |
811e87f3dded59d4aef83bf6bb2e22940d62d7e5 | The following full text is a publisher's version.
For additional information about this publication click this link.
http://hdl.handle.net/2066/83114
Please be advised that this information was generated on 2019-12-28 and may be subject to change.
Reviewed by Vincent Hunink, University of Nijmegen (NL) (v.hunink@let... | 1,618 |
85463de0732b2b571cfef773ba93954f3f621e7c | Cognitive Conceptions of the Metaphors of Time:
An Application of George Lakoff’s Conceptual Theory
of Metaphor to Shakespeare’s Sonnets
12, 15, 16, 19, 104 and 115
Roxana Moallemian Barmi and Kazuko INOUE
*Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University,
Kagamiyama 1-7-1, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-... | 6,355 |
1376d065460a386eb5daabf04f94b165d635201e | Symbolic Mythology: The Portrayal of Gender Fluidity in Kae Tempest Selected Poems
I Gusti Ayu Sundari Okasunu, I Nyoman Darma Putra
Udayana University, Denpasar, Bali
Correspondence email: ayusundariokasunu@gmail.com, idarmaputra@yahoo.com
Abstract
Myth in literary works tends to be used as a traditional story which... | 5,449 |
e7fd3b6fd752b88f439285494cd8a1a8d177e92c | Towards a Logical Approach to Nominal Sentences Analysis in Standard Arabic
Houda Anoun
To cite this version:
Houda Anoun. Towards a Logical Approach to Nominal Sentences Analysis in Standard Arabic. ESSLLI 2006 Student sessions, Jul 2006, Malaga, Spain. hal-00409499
HAL Id: hal-00409499
https://hal.archives-ouvertes... | 7,449 |
e4f0c6c26ac3205aec96062aa0abcc9990914538 | SEDUCTION AND DEATH
IN MURIEL SPARK’S FICTION
FOTINI APOSTOLOU
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY
ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI
1997
To Kostas
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it wer... | 73,654 |
af29c6ca006f0ce7880dc5c27b4b69d90a2dbff6 | CONVERSATIONAL COMPETENCE AS 'CONSTRUALISTIC' ACTIVITY
Rob Philburn
University of Salford, Allerton Building, Salford, M6 6PU, UK
Abstract
This paper builds on the previously advanced notion of the 'conversational construal', that is, the degree to which persons overlap with or differentiate from each other based on... | 4,673 |
d1f5b1f895e23a080d38e9ceb5f617a337a02d54 | USING DEONTIC MODALITY IN MAZE RUNNER (THE DEATH CURE) MOVIE
Muhammad Faisal¹, Chaidir Syahri²
¹ IKIP Siliwangi
² IKIP Siliwangi
¹ mhfaisal1610@gmail.com, ² syahri@stkipsiliwangi.ac.id
Abstract
The objectives of this research are to identify the types of deontic modality and the meaning of utterances that found in ... | 2,671 |
1d46f012a5291f7270e14460b9ebf1369de31dab | AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF
Margaret Jo Cummings for the Master of Arts
in English presented on July 18, 1978
Title: THE DESERT, THE DEVIL, AND MATURATION
IN THE SOUTHWESTERN FICTION OF PAUL HORGAN
Abstract approved: [Signature]
This paper explores chronologically the development of Paul Horgan's sense of place ... | 18,660 |
6896a33f560d5fc7291132b60b9f97bd86e8d2b8 | NOTES
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
Pg. 1: What is philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 41: “The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosop... | 4,290 |
08141f3c4e154eb048a34fca99f3dddb019abb38 | RECONSIDERING THE SELF IN SOCIAL THOUGHT: EXISTENTIAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND DIALOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Charalambos Tsekeris, Academy of Athens, Greece.
Abstract
The present article attempts to draw a general analytical framework within which to reconsider the notion of the self in the wide interdisciplinary field of soc... | 5,146 |
2224f9ae23e11511ec01c1c9de727b0ae039741b | Love, artificiality and mass identification
Derek Hook
Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, 30 Russell Square, WC 1B 5DT, UK and Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Email: d.hook@bbk.ac.uk
Love, artificiality and mass identification
**ABSTRACT:** How... | 9,390 |
999880bbfd7c93b9c60868971f8939cab6b5d41c |
Dinah Hazell’s book provides a wide-ranging survey of representations of poverty in late fourteenth-century literature. It is structured by four topics or categories: ‘Aristocratic’, ‘Urban’, ‘Rural’, and ‘Apostolic’ poverty. Each section provides the reader with a brief ‘socioeconomic overview’ and a selection of des... | 2,281 |
2a3fd13931fdb2ff29e9f94fc3fad7b6449b96f3 | To Romp in Heaven: A Translation of the Hōsa kyōshaden (Biographies of Nagoya Madmen)
© W. Puck Brecher,1 International Research Center for Japanese Studies
In premodern Japanese poetry, Nō plays, confessional ‘recluse literature,’ and the iconography of painting, reclusion and deviant behavior have long stood as exp... | 14,501 |
449340cd7d8ec7ff6e4404086faaef35111dea4a | "Show Me How You Do That Trick": Reconciling Linguistic Naturalism and Normativism
by
Adam E. O. Auch
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
at
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
March 2012
© Copyright by Adam E. O. Auch, 2012
The undersigned hereby certi... | 81,187 |
db133e612828d7d3ddc37cbc8a4da28b90a8e059 | Archaic Greece saw a number of decisive changes, including the emergence of the polis, the foundation of Greek settlements throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea, the organization of pan-Hellenic games and festivals, the rise of tyranny, the invention of literacy, the composition of the Homeric epics and the emerge... | 293,694 |
218944667d55a046a0c596928d7e7a8981b761e9 | ASSESSING ENDANGERMENT:
EXPANDING FISHPNAN’S GIDS
M. PAUL LEWIS, GARY F. SIMONS
Abstract. Fishman’s 8-level Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) has served as the seminal and best-known evaluative framework of language endangerment for nearly two decades. It has provided the theoretical underpinnings for... | 8,716 |
15bba4008fabcd02a02e38f1b826f5c69fc66f24 | BOOM DREAMS
they come to these overnight towns for the promise of steady work
and a hefty pay check—why they stay is harder to understand.
article By CRAIG VETTER
Somehow I ended up in the lobby middle of the high Wyoming prairie last February. I picked up a hitchhiker who'd been standing for an hour in a blizzard sn... | 7,819 |
d04417236f50da44b19762b2476591f110f41a0a | Between Poet and (Self-)Critic: Scholarly Interventionism in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts
MEGAN SWIHART JEWELL
Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, par... | 10,126 |
17039b8341b21b32dbbba44b14f6826c39ce2570 | Introduction
In April of 1834, an itinerant lecturer and reformer named Mrs. Hamilton delivered a speech on women’s rights to a crowded audience at the Unitarian chapel in Greenock, Scotland. After folding a handkerchief into the “form of a brain,” she argued that a correct understanding of that organ would reveal bot... | 9,625 |
fe660ea5a36642ab5d6891150c6849b7989d669d | Walter knew he was dying. Not then and there, stuck in the small balky elevator on his way up to Frieda's apartment where his weekly supper awaited, but surely sooner than later. Death felt like a cat sleeping on his chest, a slight weight that gripped at him and would often induce him to pound on his sternum with his ... | 5,513 |
400c3b6624329a0470af03e750029c59ad5642fd | What Does It Mean to "Be a Marxist"?
Adam Schaff
"What Does it Mean to 'Be a Marxist'?," in: B. Landis and E. S. Tauber (Eds.): In the Name of Life: Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm, New York (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) 1971, pp. 299-312.
Born in Lvov, Poland, Professor Adam Schaff studied there and in Paris before r... | 7,179 |
4d0b64627f10bec4793462f446f882044ef4291d | Parts of speech and dependent clauses: A typological study
van Lier, E.H.
Citation for published version (APA):
Linguistic typology studies the various ways in which languages map form onto meaning. Thus, it identifies the different grammatical constructions that languages use to express particular functional distinc... | 409 |
1b921a7921b7ce676875f786d516949cd93d0638 | CHAPTER FIVE
MODERN CHINESE CULTURE
AND THE DIFFICULTIES OF CONFUCIAN LEARNING
Generally it is held that the revolutions of the twentieth century brought radical change to Confucian thought and Confucian Learning. Although modern Confucian philosophy is a philosophical response to the present predicament of Confucian... | 913 |
b7b0dc7f42f107ffaab16ee456917e222865fa49 | MAURO CARBONE
An Unprecedented Deformation: Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas
Reviewed by Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Radboud University Nijmegen
According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, our epoch is marked by the struggle to overcome the famous Platonic distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, and this st... | 2,312 |
67af316f4175773ed3c68468a7ac49e651a7af71 | BOOK REVIEW
Niza Yanay’s *The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse*
Damon T. Berry
Saint Lawrence University
Niza Yanay, a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben Gurion University, has written a book that is both a serious contribution to the discussion of nationalist discours... | 2,279 |
9de697c537d7469ae365aa71764059f70b04ad55 | EDNA O’BRIEN:
CENSORSHIP, SEXUALITY AND
DEFINING THE “OTHER”
by
Kelly Jo Massey
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
of
Master of Arts
in
English
MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY
Bozeman, Montana
April 2011
APPROVAL
of a thesis submitted by
Kelly Jo Massey
This thesis has been r... | 27,620 |
75f0d3a2a870cdbb3d99866b9e749fdad8183424 | Death in Dresden
Poem by Gerd Honsik
Translated by gv
(Eyewitness Report)
On wheels, on hooves, on axles crawls a worm.
In but a thousand wagons, carriages, and carts
Come they tottering, crawling and walking,
Driven on by a great storm.
The city on the Elbe takes on all the refugees!
They are settled down in ... | 1,975 |
a3f6d7ab02727066f8e755e5b6206aec5b8f1387 | Christophany in The Lord of the Rings
Haley Weeder
Marquette University
Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_4610jrrt
Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
Recommended Citation
https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_4610jrrt/21
Christophany in The Lord ... | 4,262 |
82cd8a9bc200d6e815c188701656819ef91d8f1a |
The following paper is an open-access version and as such has not undergone final formatting and page-numbering by the publisher. For a private copyrighted version (i.e., in order to cite direct quotes appearing on specific pages), email the author at justindavidson@berkeley.edu.
CHAPTER THREE
INTERVOCALIC /s/-VOICI... | 16,906 |
9444a79ae6546324baae3b36726c0fb9b1386cf4 | Papeles el tiempo de los derechos
“Understanding Human Dignity”
Antonio Pele
Instituto de Derechos Humanos Bartolomé de las Casas. Departamento de Derecho Internacional, Eclesiástico y Filosofía del Derecho. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Key Words: human dignity, equal dignity, individualism, modernity.
Número: ... | 4,534 |
c0cce22ad9d059f534b209c0f6788ebd203e1dc8 | I spent five days and a thousand dollars to attend the Fifth Annual Joint Shakespeare Authorship Conference in Houston, Texas from November 5-8, 2009. It was worth it!
Beyond hearing informative and provocative presentations, I had the chance to meet and explore burning questions with eminent Oxfordians. Once Oxford i... | 19,953 |
dccb8ed39c7122267a2f6cfffc3276b9c631129b | Corso di Laurea magistrale in Lingue e Letterature Europee, Americane e Postcoloniali
Tesi di Laurea
“These Hymnes may work on future wits”
The Search for and the Conveyance of Knowledge in the Poetry of John Donne
Relatore
Ch. Prof. Loretta Innocenti
Laureando
Marco Meneghin
Matricola 815545
Anno Accademico
2014... | 73,495 |
7a0c3e24c8b510f5a6cf0b38a73aca2a4c5e2246 | Possible Worlds I: Modal Realism
May 31, 2009
It is difficult to wander far in contemporary metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. And reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has even found its way into linguistics an... | 8,083 |
3d5ba833475e1622b6fb55d03837fb8b409d81f4 | Tuesday, September 26
640 Clemens Hall
4:00 pm
José Medina
Northwestern University
Wednesday, September 27
640 Clemens Hall
4:00 pm
“Racist Propaganda and Epistemic Activism”
José Medina
Northwestern University
Thursday, September 28
640 Clemens Hall
5:00 pm
“Birth Cry – or, the Role of the Body in Hermeneutical Tran... | 255 |
8475476943cf97ec86dc9d252c0b01cdde07759a | St. Thomas, Metaphysics, and Formal Causality
Lawrence Dewan
ST. THOMAS, METAPHYSICS, AND FORMAL CAUSALITY
Lawrence Dewan
1. THE PROBLEM OF THE CAUSES
As we have elsewhere had occasion to remark, St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle can, if carefully controlled, provide precious indications... | 24,231 |
dc11f0146d6295c62af40a3d00bc2ab4345532e7 | The Use of Code Switching: A Case of Iraqi Students in University of Karabuk
Sattar J. Hashim
M. A student, Dep. of English Language, College of Letters, University of Karabuk-Turkey
Corresponding Author: Sattar J. Hashim, E-mail: sjabbar_1970@yahoo.com
ARTICLE INFO
Article History
Received: April 15, 2020
Accepte... | 5,009 |
c97fce93077e059804231e9a279d41f5b4d0b64d | Another sociology
The future of sociology from a critical theoretical perspective
Carleheden, Mikael
Published in:
Dansk Sociologi
Publication date:
1998
Document version
Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record
Citation for published version (APA):
Another Sociology - the future of sociology from a critica... | 13,240 |
a298dc6bac252613596574f9a0c97bfa20363794 | Six Poems
A Projection
Perhaps, fall won’t be any more your visiting season;
you might be seeking different sky within yourself.
My love, you now resemble a nocturnal flower,
spreading wildly away from your sustaining soil.
I have nothing else to do this September,
but to watch and wait in the woods at twilight
for t... | 712 |
4b9b0f2cb347f34b92169cadab1841fd5d3089c1 | Social Media as a Tool for Linguistic Maintenance and Preservation among the Mapuche
Introduction
Since the arrival of Spanish colonists, the Mapuche people have watched as their territory has shrunk from its original size, more than half of today’s Chile, to a few isolated pieces of hotly disputed land. A history of... | 12,141 |
7f1151e7d42f1932af51116348e9aaf5cdc5baaf | Object Markers Are Reflexes of Movement in Shekgalagadi
Rebecca Everson
University of Rochester
Abstract. In this paper, I propose that object markers (OMs) in Shekgalagadi are reflexes of object movement to a right-dislocated position. I present prosodic and morphological evidence of dislocation and argue that OMs i... | 9,903 |
d79c8699f4268e359ebaf69fd3fc91baf30738cd | 1-1-2009
Friedrich Schelling
Michael Vater
Marquette University, michael.vater@marquette.edu
The place of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) in the history of European philosophy is easily located: he was one of the major German thinkers who, in the wake of Kant's critical turn, elaborated the ambitious... | 12,558 |
eb82f17cde345d68c8190e1634211b5c10cfd634 | The following journals were indexed in a project undertaken by the National Library of Ireland between the 1940s and 1970. The dates following each title below are those for which the periodical was indexed, and these records are fully searchable online at http://sources.nli.ie
Acorn, 1961-68
Administration, 1953-69
A... | 2,943 |
5ee927e8ea078ccb1d503bcd154ab78ade4aa424 | Parody with an Ironic Edge: Dramatic Works by Kurt Weill, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Louis Andriessen
Yayoi Uno Everett
KEYWORDS: parody, satire, irony, literary criticism, semiotics, markedness theory, Linda Hutcheon, D. C. Muecke, Robert Hatten, Esti Sheinberg, Kurt Weill, Peter Maxwell Davies, Louis Andriessen
ABS... | 7,943 |
de2f29386ff5885913d91670746b16b0ba9ac470 | Abstract: Logic, the tradition has it, is normative for reasoning. But is that really so? And if so, in what sense is logic normative for reasoning? As Gilbert Harman has reminded us, devising a logic and devising a theory of reasoning are two separate enterprises. Hence, logic’s normative authority cannot reside in th... | 17,357 |
6ba990fa78d08d16c3e47d7dfec95527bbb2711d | Personal knowledge in perspective: A reply to R.T. Allen's questions
Stephen R. Palmquist
Hong Kong Baptist University, stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/rel_ja
Part of the Philosophy Commons, and the Religion Commons
This document is the authors' final version... | 4,850 |
03954bd9f6fbb3b8b53be17c8ac669558742e442 | Can Reasons Be Propositions?
Matteo Morganti & Attila Tanyi
One obviously relevant question that arises when discussing reasons is their ontological nature.
Are they states of affairs, mental states, propositions or ...?
This question is an important example of the relevance of the link between epistemology and prac... | 2,281 |
329b3aacd3e342e4a6ac99eba58bc4d4618efd6d | Joseph Conrad
Lothe, Jakob, Hawthorn, Jeremy, Phelan, James
Published by The Ohio State University Press
Lothe, Jakob, et al.
The Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/27905.
For additional information about this book
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27905
This essay will explore the relation b... | 11,549 |
afb17fb9aa07df0e7809f1a86fd228e5cd830660 | The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang
A wealthy but dysfunctional Chinese immigrant family has it all, only to lose every last cent. Mad at America, Wang, a brash but lovable immigrant businessman takes his family on a cross-country road trip that, despite a few harrowing twists and turns, eventually brings them back ... | 882 |
072b806d1cd500fab5d410189b1ff9a5489701c3 | Week 1 – Speech Sounds and Phonemes
August 30, 2012
1 Phonemes
1. Phonemes are abstract categories of speech sounds which are hypothesized to be psychologically real.
2. A strong claim is that two languages could have identical surface sounds, but different phonemic organization (Sapir, 1925).
3. Another important... | 2,551 |
de6add86035097984ba56d4b59426cdd43ce663b |
Review by Jennifer Pap, University of Denver.
The title of this book is a clever play on the French expression “donner sa langue au chat” [“give your tongue to the cat”], meaning to give up trying to work out the answer to a riddle or problem. Julien Weber explains, in an eloquent introduction, his view that authors ... | 4,013 |
7767c9fd00fef83aae321fdc70e3ba38095e1d32 | CALL FOR PAPERS
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion (EJPR)
Special Issue on:
The Philosophy and Theology of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
GUEST EDITORS:
Benedikt Paul Göcke (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Claus Dierksmeier (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), Ricardo Burgos (Universidad Pontificia Comillas)
... | 1,095 |
a1f60a1f257ad130c2354de3ca8c99068c38a9e4 | DH is us or on the unbearable lightness of a shared methodology
Meister, Jan Christoph
Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version
Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article
Zur Verfügung gestellt in Kooperation mit / provided in cooperation with:
GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
Empfohlene Zitierung /... | 4,593 |
429bd553d28084cafa21275e0d9ad63ef2453909 | CSSH NOTES
This is a provocative study of post-Communist politics in Slovakia. The author asks important questions and addresses significant approaches to the politics of transition. Her answers, however, will be looked upon skeptically by those who have studied politics, nationalism, and historical consciousness, wh... | 3,932 |
3f7c034e994348c7c413579f9a4bdf068632bcf9 | The dialectics of nature: historical blunder or heuristic view?
(Draft translation)
The text below is a translation of a talk given by Lucien Sève to the colloquium Friedrich Engels, Scholar and Revolutionary, held at the University of Paris – X Nanterre from the 17th to the 21st October 1995. The proceedings were pu... | 6,014 |
5f00bf4f92d590bbee686b5259b25ea9bb1b7cf0 | Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature
Yoon Sun Yang
The colonial frontier
Publication details
Travis Workman
Published online on: 15 Apr 2020
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT
Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms
This Document PDF may be used for researc... | 13,041 |
e064460a197078b6e654e59af954db21eddb7d9a | Authors concluded that although the follow-up period was short and the number of patients were limited, they persuade the immense epidemiological sector of the consensus that this assertion, no less than the microbiological today. But why did Medea kill her children? Is it revenge against a husband who didn’t love her? | 62 |
4dd0b83221da5c45a6412a91ea804387d6a758b2 | From Logic to Montague Grammar:
Some Formal and Conceptual Foundations of Semantic Theory
Syllabus
In general, the semantics proseminar is intended to serve as a bridge between the introductory graduate semantics courses (610, 620) and the more advanced semantics seminars. Typically, a specific subject is covered in... | 2,516 |
a315b25025ff3fee15f7409ab6d9e4e66fc9958a | 5-27-2015
Traumatic Familiarity: Fictions and Theories of Community in the Eighteenth Century
Andrew Scott Dicus
Graduate Center, City University of New York
How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!
Follow this and additional works at: http://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds
Part of the Philosophy Common... | 133,254 |
b786a7416f21f0fa4873d1df0b5f13c32859c0c7 | Representation of identity in English, German, Russian and Chechen idioms: a corpus approach
S.M. Yusupova
Kadyrov Chechen State University, 364024, A. Sheripova Str., 33, Grozny, Russia
Abstract. The article examines identity in English, German, Russian and Chechen idioms, as well as contexts of their use, obtained... | 2,843 |
ae54dc44e856190db07d307d1d4f3f867c239cd2 | Daniele Petruccioli:
A Visible “Performer” of Texts in Translation
Estelle Helene Borrey
(Macquarie University)
This article explores aspects pertaining to the translation of Philippe Djian’s best-selling novel 37°2 le matin. The source text (ST) was published in 1985, and its English counterpart Betty Blue: The Stor... | 10,149 |
72b2ff13d474bb224526d96793e6f3f2bb5abdfe | On the Translation of *Mencius*
Hongqin Ji
School of Foreign Languages, Changsha University of Science & Technology
**Abstract.** *Mencius* is a very important Chinese classic; its translation has come through three stages: the early stage, the rapid development stage and the new era. Each stage has its own features... | 2,292 |
c3221445f5ede5ce34a7789335425aa4391f3048 | DATA PAPER
Writing About Shakespeare: 1960–2010
Laura Estill¹ and Dominic Klyve²
¹ Texas A&M University, US
² Central Washington University, US
Corresponding author: Laura Estill (lestill@tamu.edu)
This dataset quantifies writing (in number of articles, books, dissertations, and monographs) about each of Shakespear... | 2,583 |
030b34be7028fda2bbccdbca5ad54a040e84d357 | A LITERARY WORD CHAIN
MARY J. YOUNGQUIST
Rochester, New York
The November 1970 issue of Word Ways challenged readers to write articles in which the last letter of each word was echoed by the first letter of the next word. A recent blizzard inspired the following poetical word chain:
WINTER REIGNS
Shimmering, gleami... | 209 |
ceddc5414194a413471e691116712e6615e8a96a | The New American Webster
HANDY COLLEGE
DICTIONARY
FOURTH EDITION
MORE THAN 16 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT!
COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED
WITH HUNDREDS OF NEW WORDS—
FROM ADWARE TO BARISTA, DOULA TO FEDAYEEN
HIGHLY READABLE TYPE
CLEAR, PRECISE DEFINITIONS
EASY-TO-FOLLOW ADVICE ON
CORRECT USAGE AND GRAMMAR
FOREIGN WORDS ... | 664,546 |
85c56d5764a33ff4315ab515f0353666e34ffe2f | This is a repository copy of *Historical Bio-Linguistics: A biostatistic approach to the study of linguistic phylogenies and the correlation of genetic, linguistic and geographical data.*
White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/133590/
Version: Published Version
**Conference or ... | 671 |
d0aa6ecc6072204ed88520980b6fb635e4a6349e | LANGUAGE STYLE AND GENRE ANALYSIS OF EULOGY
A Eulogy by Lee Hsien Yang at the Funeral Service of Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew
Bagus Dwi Pambudi
Graduate Program, Semarang State University
bagus.edu@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
This study aims at investigating the role of language as well as its characteristics and genre components in eu... | 5,446 |
745bc84e079207bfd467810d794bd26dd014fb39 | Sharing Small Stories of Life and Death Online: Death-writing of the Moment
How to cite:
For guidance on citations see FAQs.
© [not recorded]
Version: Version of Record
Link(s) to article on publisher’s website:
http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21827/ejlw.8.35553
Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site a... | 10,594 |
a44dc18901bf949b966a62233a436cc61aaf1343 | WESTERN NOVELS and Short Stories
JUNE -- $0.25
BIG 128 PAGES!
3 BIG, NEW BOOK-LENGTH NOVELS
THE HATE RIDERS
WHAT GRIM PURPOSE DROVE THESE HOLSTER-HUNG HELLIONS DOWN EVERY DARK TRAIL?
GRIPPING NOVEL BY ROD PATTERSON
GUN AT HIS BACK
SOMEBODY HAD KINCAID'S NAME ON A BULLET... BUT WHO?
BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL BY DEAN OWEN
G... | 99,806 |
007d45e18a8ccac23503b8d40ccd32b680fe1667 |
Honda CBF125 Service and Repair Manual, 2009 to 2011 2012-01 cbf125m 124cc 09 11
Absolute poverty in Europe 2019-04-03 engaging systematically with severe forms of poverty in europe this important book stimulates academic public and policy debate by shedding light on aspects of deprivation and exclusion of people in ... | 7,058 |
101271e8d849f522007360a94257107fc026568a | Fodor and demonstratives in LOT
(Fodor y los demostrativos en el lenguaje del pensamiento)
Una Stojnić*1, Ernie Lepore2
1 Princeton University
2 Rutgers University
ABSTRACT: In this paper, we consider a range of puzzles for demonstratives in the language of thought we had raised in our last philosophical conversati... | 12,257 |
13b1f4b76ec6b38a6a263af311d44c4ce49ffc00 | Some correct error-driven versions of the Constraint Demotion algorithm
Boersma, P.
DOI
10.1162/ling.2009.40.4.667
Publication date
2009
Document Version
Final published version
Published in
Linguistic Inquiry
Citation for published version (APA):
Remarks
and
Replies
Some Correct Error-Driven Versions of the Con... | 13,658 |
a8597e34b23ed43456515cbe8f5422011deb2e13 | reviews
Note: In this section, three asterisks between reviews indicate that the review above is by the same reviewer as the review below. Reviews by the members of the editorial board are signed with initials.
historiography
Noble brings new resources to the discussion of the perennial concern—the American-ness of... | 12,312 |
f3e879c9dce05b4a8b22989afcd85daee06b15c5 | LIVING HISTORY:
MYTH, REPRESENTATION AND DRAMATISING CATHERINE THE GREAT
A Thesis submitted by
Stanislaw Janowicz Candidate, MA Eng Lit, BA (Hons.) Act,
For the award of
Doctor of Philosophy
2017
Abstract
Catherine II of Russia entered the realm of legend already during her lifetime and now, over two hundred yea... | 139,312 |
ac3bd8de5d8533493a3ad99b8dfc8fc5919c42f2 | A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language
Editor:
Pamela Faber
Contributing Authors:
Pamela Faber, Maribel Tercedor Sánchez Sánchez, Clara Inés López Rodríguez, Pilar León Arauz Arauz, Arianne Reimerink, Juan Antonio Prieto Velasco, Carlos Márquez Linares, Mercedes García de Quesada, José M... | 132,729 |
9ec0af59b72b98c8ecf59e62c1020617030e74be | MAISONS DE PRESSE, MAISONS DE PASSE:
PROSTITUTION IN THE PARISIAN LITERARY MARKET, 1830 - 1923
BY
JENNIFER LYNDSEY GRANT
DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016
... | 117,424 |
9a2ad90cd326cbc69ca90e01ac523c9c19d7a631 | It has always been my contention that the circumambient pedagogical exposition of the entire science of metaphysics must be reinspired for a new interpretation.
The great Russian, Shiertieviev, while patently a curmudgeon amongst cogitators, seems, nevertheless, to faithfully intuit the necessity and the trend.
I pla... | 691 |
23c326d3b64a3b2894bf53c60b4e56341cc7de7b | The DuBois Critical Writing Awards are presented by Sigma Tau Delta, Xi Mu Chapter, for outstanding critical writing on a literary subject. Kent State University sophomores, juniors, or seniors are eligible to compete for two cash awards: $50.00, first place; $25.00, second place. In addition to the financial awards, w... | 191 |
d41895eacaee8995dfd1c817c1e1971f1e810237 | A Case for Rhetorical Method: Criticism, Theory, and the Exchange of Jean Baudrillard
Brian James Gogan
Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In
English
Bernice L. Hausman
P... | 76,291 |
93b7dfe1abad6b2e2965f579faf2294d16a4e26b | Braille is NOT a Language
Diane P. Wormsley, Ph.D.
A Position Statement of the Braille Authority of North America
Adopted November 8, 2008
The Braille Authority of North America (BANA) often receives requests to verify the status of braille as a language, in order that students may use it to qualify for language cred... | 588 |
fc847c43df210a24f5f224ce5b74d7ff230cac25 | Introduction
Research into the relationship between language and gender identity in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics has evolved considerably since its emergence in the 1970s, when it was primarily concerned with two things: demonstrating that power inequalities between the sexes were reflected in the language... | 8,790 |
868f7f4686d5d0c06a4c54f34fc03970f454ca7a | Pisces are fish. Mr. Tedder Size was very fond of catching Pisces, meaning fish. In most instances the Pisces were very fond of young Mr. Tedder Size. Seldom was it that this astute gentleman returned from such an expedition without a scaly trophy. Not that Mr. Size ever sought to commercialize this exceptional ability... | 1,498 |
5f1ed3ac0281e1a3c9cfbc4c6831d09237691c27 | to Luke was interpreted as a manifestation of not only of Christ's human nature but also of his being the son of God. E.g. for Origen, the genesis of Christ makes his two natures clear.
For Christian writers such as Origen, Eusebius, Ambrose and Augustine, the incompatibility between the genealogies in Matthew and Luk... | 1,393 |
b7f48d3ff39e10689ff73866cad63604eb91712c | APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS : FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACROSS AND AGAINST TIMES, PLACES, AND DISCIPLINES
31/01/2018
Séminaires / Journées d'études
Frederick Douglass across and against Times, Places, and Disciplines
11-13 octobre 2018, Paris
Appel à contributions
In an article entitled “Frederick Douglass, Refugee,” published... | 2,336 |
e22f9cf867c3e28063b00cd3c7788f6a173468a5 | Between Being and Becoming: A Gynocritical Reading of Selected Narratives
A B S T R A C T
Feminism since its emergence is based, in essence, on the principle of equality not only between men and woman, but even between women themselves. As such, feminism is concerned with how women are engaged in the process of being... | 7,193 |
bc2586c34c251d3f618684c0d3cf7033ead18a53 | Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation | 491f1c2baee4e1a7f0307a39a599b78
Growing Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World
Lori Dach
Increasingly, advanced technology is making its way into every aspect of children's lives. From how they learn and work, and what power and influence they h... | 2,492 |
97596c90535ef32156bfa1a065821e7791c8e02d | Sidney Kingsley
The following is an annotated, secondary bibliography of publications on the drama of Sidney Kingsley. The scope is inclusive of material published in the U.S. after 1970, a time when social concerns brought renewed interest in Kingsley's plays, particularly *Men in White*, *Dead End*, and *Detective S... | 1,925 |