Just as the American Renaissance proved amenable to political interpretation, more recently canonized traditions appear increasingly open to philosophical inquiry. Such inquiry need not entail deconstruction, neo-Marxism, or psycholinguistics, which have for decades been projected back on nineteenth-century texts. The more historically minded can turn to ideas available at the time to invoke, for instance, Hobbes before Foucault and Schelling instead of Lacan, and to view language not through Derrida but through someone like Thomas Reid. In this way, the literature of slavery can be read within the philosophical history not to attenuate theory or cultural studies but rather to advance them through an effort of synthesis that does not exclude philosophy from the domain of politics and culture. (Lee 9)
Oy. Just when I think I'm on the right track, I come across something like this and it sends me back to the drawing board. Lee's book is something I probably should have read before writing my dissertation proposal since he gets at a bunch of different things I'm interested in exploring, namely that literature of this period is invested in vexed philosophical questions regarding the position of slaves in the post-revolutionary moment. Lee does talk about some Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Kant but he's also looking the contemporary German philosophers like Schelling, people I don't even have a passing acquaintance with. I guess I'm not sure which is the most logical place from which to draw my definition of the Imaginary. Should it be from Lacan's concept of The Imaginary or should I drawing from contemporary concepts of the imaginary? Concentrate on Emerson, Kant, and the like? A little of both perhaps...use the Lacanian concept and look how the philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries enacts it?
Reading Lee's book is both great and panic-inducing because he hits several of my pet points and does it really well. His chapter on Melville even as a section called "The Almost-Ship of State." "No political philosopher of the antebellum period was more provocative then Herman Melville" (134). This is where I begin my thinking and where the dissertation ends. Of course to get there I have to get through Dred, so I better set Melville aside for now.
In his chapter on Stowe he discusses how Stowe's training in metaphysics manifests in her writing and how the violence of the abolition debates in the 1850s challenged her sentimental theory. Dred, in depicting not just the plotting of a slave insurrection but partisan violence between whites, challenges her own theories on sentiment and enlightenment in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Violence is seen as inevitable given the limits of moral sympathy and also, in some ways, desirable. This is mostly in line with Levine's analysis but with more emphasis on the way in which Stowe and her contemporaries used literature to explore and critique Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
I haven't really thought of Dred as engaging with Enlightenment philosophy in the same way that Billy Budd does. My conception of this chapter has been primarily in terms of abolitionist debates of the 1850s and in the way that representations (or non-representations) of slave insurrections and their actors echo historical anxieties regarding insurrection. In terms of the limits of reason and sympathy I've mainly seen Stowe as in denial about it. But I think Lee's offering a way to engage Dred with something beyond the debates and the echoes of Haiti, etcetera. In terms of my own argument, or what I hope my argument is shaping up to be, the way that Dred both looks at the present and the future in terms of the debate, it also looks at the past, hence the coastal nature of the title character and his tendency to meditate in the hulks of ships. I think given both Stowe's trip to Europe and this concept of her own grappling with Smith I might have something else upon which to build on my concept of the Maritime Imaginary.
Of course that means I'll have to re-read Adam Smith. Oy squared.
