December 14, 2012

"Agnew observes that the development of a mercantile economy in England introduced an anxiety regarding counterfeiting and inauthenticity in social relations. In late-imperial China, social occasions demanded the composition of poetry, and literary renown was one of the primary means of social advancement. Reading Agnew helped me to see that in the Chinese case, anxieties about counterfeit in social relations were couched in terms of concerns about the commodification of literary learning."

"I love Feldman’s description of the performance practices of Italian opera of this period. Her description of the 'magical symbiosis' that travelers to Italy noted between audiences and performers inspired my thinking about how the centrality of salon-style performance by privately held acting troupes influenced a sense of the permeability of the boundaries of the stage in seventeenth-century China."

"Zeitlin’s work – including her more recent book The Phantom Heroine – is rewarding reading for scholars outside the field of Chinese literature as well as within; she is acutely aware of European parallels, and at the same time, very invested in creating a thick interdisciplinary texture that draws from art history, history, performance studies, and history of medicine."

"Enchantment and Disenchantment is perhaps the most influential work on the ethos of the seventeenth century and its influence on later Chinese literature. This is must reading for anyone interested in the history of fictionality in Chinese literature."

“William Pietz’s classic trilogy of articles, The Problem of the Fetish, is a must-read for anyone who uses the term. As Pietz writes, the term 'fetish' is 'discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive;' it is in part to combat the indiscriminate use of the term that he examines the early history of the fetish. Pietz’s description of the seventeenth and eighteenth century conceptualization of the fetish provides an important proto-history for Marx’s use of the term in particular."

"The 'superfluous things' of the title are the essential elements of luxury in seventeenth-century China: bronzes, incense burners, teapots, young boys who serve tea. Craig Clunas’s work on luxury consumption has been widely influential in Chinese studies. Generations of scholars had mined the seventeenth-century texts on connoisseurship that Cluna discusses for evidence of practice. Drawing upon Bourdieu and Appadurai, Clunas read these texts instead as rhetorical documents that testified to conceptualizations of consumption and commodification."

"This article by the anthropologist Teri Silvio was written some twenty-five years after Agnew’s Worlds Apart, and it speaks to the sea-change in conceptions of the subject occasioned by the new omnipresence of digital media.

"Festa illuminates the curious relationship between sentimental fiction and the politics of empire. The chapter on Sterne’s snuffbox offers an exceptionally deft close reading, as well as an example of Festa’s ability to ferret out archival materials that are perfectly matched with her primary texts."

"Freedgood models a kind of reading that abjures thematic or allegorical readings of literary objects. Instead, she uncovers the forgotten history of novelistic objects (mahogany, tobacco, calico) and then draws upon that history to elucidate new readings of classic Victorian novels. Freedgood’s examination of the history of mahogany, for example, leads to a fresh and unexpected reading of Jane Eyre. Freedgood gestures toward a new way of reading fiction; the work’s importance extends far beyond her case studies."