| Scholars of both eighteenth-century and postmodern culture have long demanded a reexamination of Enlightenment. I argue that J.M. Coetzee's Foe, John Fowles's A Maggot and Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover answer this call. As historiographic metafiction, these novels recuperate and revalue specific discourses within eighteenth-century culture and suggest that our Enlightenment inheritance may be emotional---that the first-person narratives that became hugely popular during the eighteenth-century are important for their potential to provide opportunities for sympathetic identification and the eliciting of feelings of responsibility. Specifically, through their representation of eighteenth-century discourses of prostitution, Foe, A Maggot, and The Volcano Lover celebrate the potential of suffering to provoke feelings of responsibility and of first-person narrative forms to make that suffering visible.;In this project I achieve two aims. First, by grounding the textual details of these postmodern novels in specific eighteenth-century contexts, I clarify our understanding of how historiographic metafiction can refigure our past. By highlighting the eighteenth-century difficulties and potentials for developing sympathy for whores, Coetzee's, Fowles's, and Sontag's novels emphasize the capacity of individuals to develop feelings of responsibility for coerced agents. By excavating the connection of these novels to eighteenth-century notions of language, identity, religious enthusiasm, and aesthetics, I demonstrate how Foe, A Maggot, and The Volcano Lover explore prompts and blocks to fellow feeling.;Second, my project illustrates how these novels construct the first-person narrative---in the form of memoir, letter, and testimony---as a means of cultivating sympathetic identification and feelings of responsibility. The character of Susan Barton in Coetzee's Foe and her attempts to control her story feature the affective valences of signification. In Fowles's A Maggot, the character of Rebecca Lee's testimony trumps blocks to identification and elicits sympathy in her auditor. Sontag's The Volcano Lover conjures competing aesthetic visions of the late eighteenth-century and represents Emma Hamilton's letter-writing as the most effective form of provoking affective response. Each of these postmodern novels demonstrates the impact narrative form had and continues to have on the ability of individuals to see and hear someone else's story and to feel for that story. |
