Kirjahaku

Why has the realist novel been persistently understood as promoting liberalism? Can this tendency be reconciled with an equally familiar tendency to see the novel as a national form? In "A Probable State", Irene Tucker builds a revisionary argument about liberalism and the realist novel by shifting the focus from the rise of both in the 18th century to their breakdown at the end of the 19th. Through a series of intricate and absorbing readings, Tucker relates the decline of realism and the eroding logic of liberalism to the question of Jewish characters and writers and to shifting ideas of community and nation. Whereas previous critics have explored the relationship between liberalism and the novel by studying the novel's liberal characters, Tucker argues that the liberal subject is represented not merely within the novel, but in the experience of the novel's form as well. With special attention to George Eliot, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and S.Y. Abramovitch, Tucker show show we can understand liberalism and the novel as mode of recognizing and negotiating with history.

Why has the realist novel been persistently understood as promoting liberalism? Can this tendency be reconciled with an equally familiar tendency to see the novel as a national form? In "A Probable State", Irene Tucker builds a revisionary argument about liberalism and the realist novel by shifting the focus from the rise of both in the 18th century to their breakdown at the end of the 19th. Through a series of intricate and absorbing readings, Tucker relates the decline of realism and the eroding logic of liberalism to the question of Jewish characters and writers and to shifting ideas of community and nation. Whereas previous critics have explored the relationship between liberalism and the novel by studying the novel's liberal characters, Tucker argues that the liberal subject is represented not merely within the novel, but in the experience of the novel's form as well. With special attention to George Eliot, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and S.Y. Abramovitch, Tucker show show we can understand liberalism and the novel as mode of recognizing and negotiating with history.

"The Moment of Racial Sight" overturns the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the idea that race is constructed, that it operates by attaching visible marks of difference to arbitrary meanings and associations. Searching for the history of the constructed racial sign, Irene Tucker argues that if people instantly perceive racial differences despite knowing better, then the underlying function of race is to produce this immediate knowledge. Racial perception, then, is not just a mark of acculturation, but a part of how people know one another. Tucker begins her investigation in the Enlightenment, at the moment when skin first came to be used as the primary mark of racial difference. Through Kant and his writing on the relation of philosophy and medicine, she describes how racialized skin was created as a mechanism to enable us to perceive the likeness of individuals in a moment. From there, Tucker tells the story of instantaneous racial seeing across centuries - from the fictive bodies described but not seen in Wilkie Collins' realism to the medium of common public opinion in John Stuart Mill, from the invention of the notion of a constructed racial sign in Darwin's late work to the institutionalizing of racial sight on display in the HBO series "The Wire". Rich with perceptive readings of unexpected texts, this ambitious book is an important intervention in the study of race.

A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler uses the chance synchronicity of the 2013 Israeli parliamentary elections and literary theorist Judith Butler's controversial Brooklyn College address calling for the boycotting of Israeli academic, cultural, and economic institutions as an occasion for examining possible relations between Jewishness and state-centered forms of self-governance. In an extended analysis of Butler's Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Tucker shows how the alignment of certain authors' identities and ideas undergirding Butler's analytical framework draws upon a pointedly Christian conception of belief. This Christian conception of belief structures the most familiar understandings of modern secularism, articulated most famously by John Locke in his "Letter Concerning Toleration." Tucker reads Locke's "Letter"' alongside Jewish philosopher/rabbi Moses Mendelssohn's 1783 critique of Locke, Jerusalem: Or On Religious Power and Judaism, and the Jewish tradition of the minyan, making a case for the existence of an alternative history of publicness borrowing from Jewish conceptions of communal life and the proper relations of actions and ideas.In throwing light on a genealogy of Jewish practices aimed at the deliberate creation of collectives constituted by their grappling with contingent, historical time, Tucker argues for the existence of a Jewish tradition of republicanism, of democracy. Within such a context, the Jewishness of Israel can be seen to lie first and foremost in its methods of generating a civil collective out of a diverse citizenry rather than in the identities of its individual citizens. The tradition Tucker has in mind explicitly uses an idea of ritual or "ceremonial law" to sustain within itself a tension between a heterogeneity of perspectives and interests constitutive of democratic process and the forms of unity and agreement often understood to be the desired outcome of that process. By setting forth a framework in which heterogeneity and agreement are conceived as coincident modes of political being rather than steps in a linear process, this "Jewish republicanism" frames law-making, implementation and following as forms of a single structure of ritual practice. Such a framework might provide the inspiration and authority for reconceiving some of the fundamental relations of the Zionist project.Irene Tucker, a professor of English at University of California, Irvine, is currently at work on a collection of essays exploring conceptions of the relations of culture and state sovereignty in Israel and contemporary Jewish life. She is the author of two previous books, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (2012), which investigated the connections of race, history of medicine, and 18th and 19th century European philosophy and literature, and A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract and the Jews (2000), which made a case for the links of liberalism, nationalism and the form of the realist novel in 19th-century British novel, as well as in the early Hebrew novel. Before coming to UC Irvine, Irene Tucker was a faculty member in the English departments at Johns Hopkins University and Duke University.