Epilogue Afterlives of Ariel’s Ecology
Epilogue Afterlives of Ariel’s Ecology
In this epilogue, the author argues that the work of accessing minoritarian enlightenments requires a strategy of transversal reading that cuts across, but not against, a work’s stated interests, allowing the excavation of the set of desires and fantasies that cannot be reduced to the more dominant interests that move through that same work. The author’s aestheticized way of writing about William Bartram, Phillis Wheatley, Leonora Sansay, and others, while faithful to the historical record, emphasizes and makes much of details in their works that are strange and remain unsolved and untreated in literary criticism. The chapter also provides an analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, situating the novel in a minoritarian work and genealogy that develops within a majority tradition and offers a port through which character or critic might move to produce alternate forms of personhood and sociality.
Keywords: minoritarian enlightenments, William Bartram, Phillis Wheatley, Leonora Sansay, literary criticism, Edgar Allan Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, personhood, sociality
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