The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

This chapter positions literature as a space in which polarized discourses on refugees can exist as conarratives, both acknowledging the grand scenes/sites of tragedy that produce the refugee and the refugees’ internal contextual dimensions. Utilizing Critical Refugee Studies frameworks and refugitude as conceived by Khatharya Um, this chapter reads Roxane Gay’s Ayiti as a text that balances conarratives of abjection and agency. The chapter argues that Gay’s strategic deployment of literary devices in Ayiti demonstrate how fiction can attend to both the exteriority of spectacle and the interiority of experience, thus constructing a more complete and robust conarrative framework through which the refugee can be portrayed with dignity.

Part I, ‘Hearing Subjects’, turns attention to Robert Schumann, addressing the composer’s early grappling with the Romantic problematisation of subjectivity and personal identity frequently present in his music of the 1830s and early 1840s. In ‘Hearing the Self’, I trace the historical development of subjectivity in music up to Schumann’s time, before turning to an early and notable exemplification of the composer’s practice in Carnaval. This forms the starting point for a more detailed consideration of the ways in which a sense of subjectivity can be manifested in Schumann’s piano music of the 1830s, including such features as allusiveness, idiosyncrasy, interiority, a fantasy principle in connexion of moods, and the questioning of continuity and coherence. Finally, I look at the sense of subjectivity conveyed in Schumann’s concertos and the sense in which they collapse distinctions between self and world.

Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, of 1846 holds a contested place in the nineteenth-century repertory. One of her finest compositional achievements, it was performed regularly throughout the nineteenth century. Yet she herself seems to have led the way for a languishing of its reputation when, upon its publication in 1847, she acknowledged that she ‘did not care for it particularly’ and that, by comparison to Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63, composed a year later, it now ‘sounded effeminate and sentimental’. This may represent nothing more than an internalization of the widespread belief at this time in women’s inferiority as composers, but her self-doubt cast a long shadow. Clara Schumann’s Trio is usually cited in recent scholarship merely to contextualize Robert Schumann’s Trios (Daverio, 1997; Nemko, 1997), or to exemplify the composer’s capacity for withdrawal into the private musical sphere by way of coping with the emotional and psychological distress with which she was dealing when she composed the piece (Reich, 1985, Rev. 2001; Ferris, 2004).

This chapter considers Schumann’s Trio in relation to a range of contemporaneous piano trios, and through the lens of the New Formenlehre, giving particular emphasis to fugal passages in the opening and closing movements. The striking pianistic virtuosity of this Trio is matched by a compositional virtuosity that significantly enhances our understanding of romantic sonata form. Schumann’s innovations are explored in relation to the Schumannian belief that only through interiority might virtuosity be legitimized and elevated. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Schumann’s Trio as a formal model for later Piano Trios by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Bedřich Smetana.

Contemplating the history of identity faces seemingly insurmountable challenges – mostly raising suspicion: from whose perspective and value for whom? This chapter assumes multiple histories of identity and proceeds in three steps. By sifting through how the term identity intersects in contemporary language use with neighboring concepts (such as self, subject/subjectivity, individual/authenticity, and consciousness/conscience), we filter out a core narrative for contemporary identity discourses. Basic to modern identity is the assumption of an interior navigation-bridge from where three kinds of decision-territories are navigated: (i) temporal stability and change; (ii) how to blend in and differentiate from others; and (iii) how to engage as agentive subject or as being subjected to forces in the world. In this narrative, the internal command-bridge is accessible by and to the self using (self-)reflective means. The central part of our contribution subjects this kind of identity narrative to a form of historical interrogation in relation to (i) how it came into being in a particular region (Europe) and at a particular time (the Enlightenment); (ii) which discourses were included and which ones were systemically excluded; and (iii) how it was possible that this identity narrative gained power in everyday sense-making in general and in the discipline of psychology in particular. In a final section, we consider whether there are ways to conceptualize alternative narratives of identity that can inspire innovative discourses to theorize and empirically investigate identity.

This chapter explores assumptions about what things are made of (physicality) as revealed by ethnography and the study of antiquity. The history of Greek speculations on the problem reveals a striking diversity, where Aristotle’s ontology based on the primacy of substances was certainly not universally accepted by other theorists. A very different view on the question is common among ancient Chinese writers, who usually focussed not on stable substances but on interacting processes. This allows us to qualify some of the conclusions proposed by the anthropologist Descola in his account of the contrast between naturalism and animism.

This chapter reviews the complex evidence for differing conceptions of the locus of cognitive and affective faculties that have been entertained, as reported in modern ethnography and in the evidence for ancient societies such as Greece and China. The contrast between physicality and interiority that Descola uses to draw up a taxonomy of ontological regimes is subject to qualifications insofar as mind–body dualism is only one of a number of schemata that are to be found across cultures.

The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.

This chapter reassesses characterisations of the long eighteenth century as one devoted to accumulating anatomies and constructing taxonomies. Scholars have traced a broad movement, across the sciences, politics, and wider culture, toward simplification and categorisation – against the threat of ambiguity and complexity. In particular, critics and historians have identified a drive to identify anatomical, physiological explanations for human character and behaviour. Yet, those other eighteenth-century cultural ‘revolutions’ – the culture of sensibility and the emergence of modern selfhood – indicate a growing emphasis on specificity, individuation, and personal identity, which would seem to oppose the trend toward simplification. How do we account, then, for these seemingly contradictory movements towards simplification on the one hand and complexity on the other? I address this question by focusing on the cultural resonances surrounding certain objects, which ‘perform’ identity at the broad and busy intersection of politics, medicine, literature, and visual culture. In doing so, I show how things and words became fused with bodies in the development of anatomical and physiological knowledge throughout the long eighteenth century.

This essay argues that at the center of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetics, is a commitment to Gnosticism, a quest to find alternative ways of knowing. As an analogue to his sense that poetry at its best poses questions rather than seeking facile answers, Komunyakaa’s gnostic poetics is built around the impulse to embrace oppositions in which his poems endorse “critical values such as the virtue of transgression and the unity found in oppositions.” This essay argues that Komunyakaa’s poetics pursue a heuristic posture reminiscent of the emotional interiors revealed in blues music. Komunyakaa’s poems seek to explore the “strange debts we owe to others” along with “the strange debts we owe to ourselves, our imagination.”Looking at his later volumes of poems engage a variety of European landscapes and tropes, the influence of jazz and the blues on the poet’s oeuvre remains consistent. Employing Edward Pavlíc’s reimagining of James Baldwin’s notion of the “dark window” as a critical frame, this essay endeavors to provide a nuanced appraisal of Komunyakaa’s career, situating his poetry at the intersection of gnosis and improvisation.

This chapter reveals the ways in which race is not incidental to tragedy’s moral and aesthetic claims, but rather central to the genre’s attention to social forces and philosophical concerns. Shakespeare’s tragedies reveal how the premodern imaginary considers race as both a mimetic, ephemeral enactment and proof of an essential, inherent difference. As opposed to being hampered by this contradiction, depictions of race often move between fluid, malleable, and unstable expressions of identity, providing a lexicon for the epistemological crisis of tragedy’s formation of subjectivity. In the genre’s epistemological exploration of subjectivity as a publicly scripted experience and a fundamentally separate, and at times inaccessible, essence, Shakespeare’s tragedies engage the multilayered, contradictory template of racial impersonation. Thus, attention to regimes and categories of race animates some of the most fundamental issues of inclusion and exclusion that the English looked to tragedy to illuminate.

This introductory chapter explains the book’s big arguments: how Seneca is an important precursor for aspects of Shakespearean tragic characterization that seem presciently modern and how Shakespeare associates Senecan individualism with the loss of republican identity coordinates. Postromantic criticism has associated Shakespearean characterization with modern freedom, but it is indebted to Senecan tragedy where freedom from social constraint has a very different valence. In Seneca, freedom is associated with the loss of social coordinates and the potential for moral monstrosity, and that is part of what Shakespeare associates with personal freedom as well. This chapter traces the postromantic reception histories of Shakespeare and Seneca and shows that the emergence of an idea of Shakespeare as the poet of modernity has implied a downgrading of Seneca and therefore a willful occlusion of what is interesting about Senecan tragedy. It reviews how a revitalized interest in Senecan characterization supplements recent work on Shakespearean character.

Every novel creates its own map, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has at least two. One is the geopolitical map of the world, on which the warring forces of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are locked in an unending struggle for dominance. The other is the geography of social interaction, private space, and psychological interiority located in the perceptions and the mind of Orwell’s anti-hero, Winston Smith. Each has its own language, the geopolitical map being described in journalistic and strategic language, the private domain in the familiar novelistic discourse of private life. Orwell said Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by the Teheran conference of 1943, in which the leaders of the Allied powers discussed dividing the post-war world up between them. But he also wrote a novel about the fate of a private citizen in an imagined age of totalitarian surveillance, desperately seeking sanctuary spaces in which to take refuge from an all-seeing regime. This essay describes the global and the personal geography of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and seeks to show how these map on to each other, how brutal power seeks absolute control of both, and how each nonetheless retains a fragile space for resistance and hope.

Augustine directs his readers’ attention to the soul as an inner world, an interior space of the self that is not literally a place, but rather a dimension of being in which truths may be found, including God as the eternal truth that has always been present both within and above the soul as its creator. Yet, the self comes late to God within itself, because as sinners we keep turning our attention outward, trying to find happiness in external things.

ew works of literature have occasioned such vehement controversy as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Almost every aspect of the play has been debated: the date, the text, the authorship, and, most significant, the ethos of the drama. Commentators adopting a heroic interpretation of the tragedy see the play as a celebration of Faustus, the humanist hero of Renaissance individualism, who barters his soul in return for all the things the Renaissance privileged: knowledge, beauty, power. Conversely, Christian apologists read the play as a religiously orthodox drama condemning Faustus as a damned sinner. After seeking to guide the reader through the labyrinth of critical controversy surrounding the tragedy, I conclude that the play validates both the Christian and humanist readings, depicting a hero whom we can simultaneously admire and censure, sympathize with and deplore. The presence of contradictory perspectives evoking markedly divergent responses to the multifaceted hero suggests that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe penned an interrogative drama that brilliantly argues on both sides of the question.