Introduction of Nancy Armstrong
By Lois Cucullu, Professor of English
It’s fitting that a series named to honor one distinguished former colleague, Joseph Warren Beach, would be a venue for reunion with another.
Good evening, everyone. To the list of notable scholars, writers, and critics who have stood at this podium on such a night as tonight, it’s my pleasure to present this year’s Joseph Warren Beach Lecturer—Nancy Armstrong.
Our gathering this evening is as much about welcoming back this scholar to campus as it is offering her this important forum to address us.
Leaving Minnesota in 1991 as Professor of Comparative Literature, she returns to us this evening as Brown University’s Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media, and Gender Studies. I lay particular stress on this train of disciplinary affiliations to emphasize the intellectual range and ever increasing breadth of an academic career that can no longer be captured by the once capacious term “comparative”—but deserves that richer appellation of “inter” or “multi-disciplinary.”
The merest glance at the journals that have published her work attests to the diverse audiences she has commanded—among them, Modernism/Modernity, differences, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Cultural Critique, Poetics Today, American Journal Of Semiotics, Genders, Victorian Studies. Nor should we overlook in this recitation the journal Novel, A Forum on Fiction that she has edited since 1993, and which last year celebrated its 40th year of publication.
If provocative and transformative are the descriptions most closely associated with her work, these remain apt for her most recent monograph How Novels Think, published in 2005, that showed British novels to be the perfect baggy monsters for reprogramming individualism to comport to the changing needs of the nation state. In this way, the daring entrepreneur and adventuress of the 18th century could give way in 19th century novels to the more compliant capitalist and his missus. As well do these terms apply to its predecessor Fiction in The Age of Photography, which takes up the subject of literary realism and forcefully argues that not only did realism anticipate photography but, more radically still, it made images the source of intelligibility for subjects no less than for objects—all vying for respectability in that imperial trove of Victorian clutter. What were Dickens’s Veneerings after all—stylish couple or smart matching sideboards?
But surely most of us here, and I include myself, came to this scholar’s work first through the catalyst of Desire and Domestic Fiction that continues after two decades to resonate in literary studies and feminist scholarship. Its determined skepticism about authority, power relations, and truth claims and its insistence on the importance of discourse as both an ideological and social agent in shaping the modern subject became the springboard for a whole new generation of scholars and feminists. Indeed, if second wave feminism came to an end in the early Nineties, in retrospect, it’s fair to say that Desire and Domestic Fiction was present at the post-mortem. It showed that women’s historical relation to power was more substantial and complex than had been supposed in the female middle-class rebellions against Fifties' conformity that fueled women’s aspirations into the Sixties and beyond. True to its investment in discourse, it predicted the positions of power that women, for better or worse, would next assume.
Thus it’s right and proper that this reunion take place in the spacious rooms of the Weisman where are collected so many innovative and inveterate contrarians whose bold and original visions upset the conventional, debunked the ready platitude, and tampered with the received wisdom of their elders and betters.
Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, there is this acknowledgement of another history lurking about the periphery of this introduction. Minnesota’s loss in letting its colleague leave for another institution in the early Nineties was, in fact, my gain. I was lucky enough to be among the graduate students in the first seminar this scholar taught on arriving at Brown in the fall of 1991 and thereafter among those fortunate enough to claim her as a dissertation director—this group is now liberally sprinkled at universities across the Northern Hemisphere. So here is an opportunity I can’t let pass, to profess my own personal debt to the University of Minnesota for the great favor it did me in 1991, which by an odd calculus I seem to be in the happy position of repaying even now as I speak. My greater debt, however, intellectual and professional, is to the person who returns to address us tonight. So please, turn off your cell phones, silence your pagers, and put away those ipods, for here in the presence of a scholar for whom no critical commonplace is safe or sacred, you won’t want to miss a single word she says. Join me, then, in warmly welcoming back to Minnesota—Nancy Armstrong.
April 9, 2008
Weisman Museum