Frances Ferguson – författare

When we think of debates about pornography, what first comes to mind is the question of whether it should be banned or protected. But perhaps we should ask instead what pornography tells us about the way individuals are valued or represented. Combining literary criticism and political theory, Frances Ferguson describes the affinities between pornography and less controversial representations to provide a better understanding of its harms and to demonstrate how it works. Pornography first developed in western Europe during the late eighteenth century in tandem with the rise of utilitarianism, the philosophical position that stresses the importance of something's usefulness over its essence. Through incisive readings of Sade, Flaubert, Lawrence, and Bret Easton Ellis, Ferguson shows how pornography - like utilitarian social structures - diverts our attention from individual identities to actions and renders more clearly the social value of such actions through concrete literary representations. Only when pornography is used to expel individuals from social structures or institutions that promote value, Ferguson argues, is it potentially dangerous.Impassioned, judicious, and deeply informed, Pornography, the Theory will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in literature and its cultural history.

When we think of debates about pornography, what first comes to mind is the question of whether it should be banned or protected. But perhaps we should ask instead what pornography tells us about the way individuals are valued or represented. Combining literary criticism and political theory, Frances Ferguson describes the affinities between pornography and less controversial representations to provide a better understanding of its harms and to demonstrate how it works. Pornography first developed in western Europe during the late eighteenth century in tandem with the rise of utilitarianism, the philosophical position that stresses the importance of something's usefulness over its essence. Through incisive readings of Sade, Flaubert, Lawrence, and Bret Easton Ellis, Ferguson shows how pornography - like utilitarian social structures - diverts our attention from individual identities to actions and renders more clearly the social value of such actions through concrete literary representations. Only when pornography is used to expel individuals from social structures or institutions that promote value, Ferguson argues, is it potentially dangerous.Impassioned, judicious, and deeply informed, Pornography, the Theory will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in literature and its cultural history.

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson’s critical writing over four decades.Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities—the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out.Gathering Ferguson’s most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, “The Nuclear Sublime,” in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson’s foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; “Pornography, the Theory,” where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in which she analyzes Austen’s use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of “over-knowing” others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.A vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, Records of Reward will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson’s critical writing over four decades.Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities—the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out.Gathering Ferguson’s most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, “The Nuclear Sublime,” in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson’s foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; “Pornography, the Theory,” where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in which she analyzes Austen’s use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of “over-knowing” others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.A vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, Records of Reward will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartman's voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original conception of the relationship between literary and critical writing that is still considered a deeply significant contribution to the field. In The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, the most important contemporary critics of Romantic poetry and trauma reflect on Hartman's work and its lasting influence. This collection of sixteen essays-including a new essay from Hartman-provides a wide-ranging and thorough perspective on recent approaches to Romanticism. Contributors: Leslie Brisman, Yale University; Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame; Cathy Caruth, Emory University; Helen Regueiro Elam, University of Albany; Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago; Paul H. Fry, Yale University; Kevis Goodman, University of California at Berkeley; Ortwin de Graef, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium); Robert J. Griffin, Texas A & M University; Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University; J.Douglas Kneale, University of Western Ontario; Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara; Peter J. Manning, Stony Brook University; Donald G. Marshall, Pepperdine University; J. Hillis Miller, University of California at Irvine; Lucy Newlyn, Oxford University; Patricia Parker, Stanford University.