I first met Elaine Freedgood seven years ago, when she sent an abstract to me after her friend and colleague, Toral Gajarawala, came across a call for papers I had posted for an MLA session on fictional worlds. Since then, I've been just one of many people who have received tremendous behind-the-scenes support from Elaine, and I want to take some time to reflect on this profound but largely invisible way in which she has contributed to the profession. At the same time that Elaine has forged lifelong friendships with her students, continuing to support them long after they have moved on to new institutions and new stages of life, she has also cultivated close relationships with countless PhD candidates, job-seekers, and junior faculty members who never had a chance to pass through her classroom. What makes these relationships so special is precisely their unofficial, noninstitutional nature—in much the same way that it can be so important and life-changing for teenagers to have a “cool” adult in their lives who is not one of their parents.

It is an honor to have the chance to discuss publicly Elaine Freedgood's work and its effects—“incalculably diffusive,” as they say in Middlemarch—in the world. George Eliot is an idealist and Elaine a materialist, which means that tracing Elaine's work and its work in the world, unlike that of the more pious and boring Dorothea Brooke, is possible. You can touch it. To do this labor of tracing will require thinking about Elaine's commitment to the category of the material, against the ideal and the idealized; it will also require thinking about the place that the conceptual or theoretical, but also the affective and communal, occupy for her, in relation to what Raymond Williams used to call concrete social processes. If Dorothea has a “finely tuned spirit,” with “many fine issues,” Elaine's allegiances push her away from finery, away too from “spirit.” Away, as she says in her reading of this very passage, from “mysterious, quietist, and … deeply sentimental form[s]” of consolation and toward “larger historical processes that cannot be domesticated.”

I felt both tremendously honored and slightly alarmed when I learned that this roundtable was being organized. I was delighted that such a stellar group of novel critics was willing to read Telling It Like It Wasn't but worried about their reactions to what Deidre Lynch has called the book's “deeply weird materials.” Much of the historical substance, especially the military and economic historiography, are far from our usual interests, and many of the literary texts are obscure and ephemeral. Furthermore, I passed over the opportunity to write about the best-known novels (like Philip Roth's Plot Against America) by limiting my twentieth-century case studies to American Civil War and British World War II counterfactuals. So I worried that a panel on this eccentric book might seem merely an irrelevant interruption, especially in the context of a meeting of the Society for Novel Studies.

Although my critical focus has shifted in recent years onto other areas—both earlier and later—of novel studies, I find myself returning to the novels of the 1840s, which is, in my view, the pivotal moment in the history and theory of the British novel. This is the moment when novels relegated forever to the past a future that ensured domestic contentment. During the period from 1847 to 1900, as Georg Lukács tells the story, the historical novel faltered and then froze in its tracks, as the narrative of an individual caught in the winds of historical change capitulated to descriptions of demonically fetishized objects that obscured the engines of change. What Lukács doesn't mention is that, halfway through that same period, novels abruptly ceased to formulate a country house providing what Hannah Arendt has called “a model of national housekeeping.” From the ashes of that bourgeois appropriation of certain aspects of the genteel way of life, the novels of the 1840s assembled a single-family household as a kinship system uniquely capable of operating at every level of English society. To go by these novels, one would think that belonging to such a household was not only the same as belonging to English society itself but was also necessary to one's biological survival. In returning to that moment, I want to consider, more pointedly, what these two observations concerning the form of the Victorian novel have to do with one another, a question that was very much in the air in 1977, when I received my doctorate and took up my first university post.

“Totality” offers itself for reading under the rubric of “defamiliarization” less on the basis of our overfamiliarity with it than on account of our already estranged relationship to it. Not only literary critics but also cultural theorists, art historians, and philosophers bid “totality” adieu in the 1990s through the influence of Jean-François Lyotard's forging of a causal link between thought under the sign of totality and action under the sign of totalitarianism, and his ensuing imperative, “Let us wage a war on totality.” The war is over and done with now that the eminently influential Bruno Latour has decried the intellectual and political fallout of “totality” on his way to explicitly resignifying Margaret Thatcher's dictum, “There is no such thing as society.” Yet in the process of conflating academic method and political action, the victors in this war have shrouded totality in confusion. It is the goal of this brief essay to address this confusion, to defamiliarize our defamiliarization. Victorianists in particular should take up the problematic anew, since totality has long been the lynchpin of modernist and postmodernist dismissals of Victorian literature as at once naïve and sinister, encyclopedic and imperialist, bloated, boring, and baggy. When Victorianists have tried to defend against these dismissals, they have generally emphasized that the fiction of the period is more fragmented, self-reflexive, and modernist than such charges admit—that, in short, the novel should not be associated with totality. But this cedes too much ground to bad definitions of totality. Another path to reclaim the aesthetic strengths and epistemic benefits of our period's literature would be to strike at the root, regrounding better definitions.

In Middlemarch, when Mr. Brooke asks Edward Casaubon how he arranges his documents, the pedantic would-be author of “The Key to All Mythologies” replies with a “startled air of effort” that he puts them into “pigeon-holes mostly.” Dorothea's uncle is baffled. He complains that his own scattered gatherings became much too “mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.” Embarrassed, his niece volunteers to sort out his papers: “I would letter them all, and then make a list of subjects under each letter.” Her offer catches Mr. Casaubon's attention. Commending Mr. Brooke for having such “an excellent secretary at hand,” he gravely smiles his approval. But the befuddled gentleman whose mind remains full of disconnected “fragments” bluntly rejects Dorothea's offer: “‘No, no,’ said Mr. Brooke: ‘I cannot let young ladies meddle with my documents. Young ladies are too flighty.’”

Practiced by both state and nonstate agents, biopower operates by recognizing certain bodies as life-worthy and cultivating them so that they thrive under capitalism, while consigning other bodies to death, deprivation, or extractable labor in the service of the life-worthy. French philosopher Michel Foucault famously coined the term in his historical analyses of modern Western power. He argued that biopower emerged in the eighteenth century in western Europe in conjunction with imperial wars of conquest. It joined forces with sovereignty, which relies on laws and the legitimate monopoly of physical force, and discipline, a newer mode of power, which shifted the traditional target of sovereign rule from a territory and its borders to a population conceived of as abstract individuals. Three recent books take us to the nineteenth century in England and the United States, a period when biopower expanded its reach, positing and exploiting biological divisions within and between national populations: Nathan K. Hensley's Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty, Nasser Mufti's Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture, and Kyla Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century.

I have never forgotten a comment made by a friend at the first feminist meeting, held in Bloomington Indiana, in the spring of 1969: “Nothing travels faster than an idea whose time has come.” We were amazed and thrilled to discover how much we had in common with other women, and how the women's movement in its early stages gave us permission to express in public a variety of extreme emotions. All of us at that meeting were young, untenured faculty and graduate students, and suddenly—or at least so it seemed—we could speak out against authority. And sometimes authority listened. We quickly turned to writing, our natural medium, for we realized that our academic work had an immediate resonance with our political ambitions. How rare and special this moment was for those of us who worked on the literature of dead authors!

In his evocatively named “Attacks on Linking,” originally published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1959, W. R. Bion describes patients who produce symptoms—hallucinations, stutters, sleepiness—designed, unconsciously, to destroy closeness with the analyst. In a numbered list of “clinical examples,” Bion describes incidents from his own practice: one patient sees a blue haze filling the room. Another reports two probability clouds floating in the air. A third tries to agree with what Bion has said, but stammers so markedly that he cannot get the words out. A fourth hallucinates that a piece of iron falls to the floor. The haze, the clouds, the stuttering, the “dead piece of iron,” initially inexplicable, become in Bion's hands “attacks on linking”: ways not to see, not to speak, not to connect, not to think.

My title is paradoxical, possibly wrong. Refamiliarizing means reintroducing the once known but since forgotten on the assumption that familiarity fosters understanding. The logic on view inheres in the root word, “familiar”: “known to a person from long or close association.” But Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), enfant terrible of the Russian Formalists from the second decade of the twentieth century right to the end of his long life (another paradox), contests that logic. Defamiliarization, his most significant contribution to literary theory, posits that more familiarity with flogging, sex, or the custom of burying the dead—his examples, to which I will return—results in less rather than more of a sense of what they are. In a consequential opposition, Shklovsky claims we lose the ability to see what we encounter frequently; we come instead merely to recognize it by its outlines, “as though it were enveloped in a sack.” To see it again, to see it in all its particularity, requires the disorientation that arises when the familiar appears before us as precisely, if temporarily, unrecognizable. Since I aim to render strange, to remove the sack, this little essay should of course be called “Defamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky.”

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.

As Mrs. Herriton contemplates the fate and future of her wayward daughter-in-law, Lilia's baby born to the Italian Gino Carella in E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, she surmises reluctantly, “Let us admit frankly … that after all we may have responsibilities.” Without limiting ourselves to Forster's responses to and articulations of these “responsibilities,” the notion nonetheless of having such responsibilities usefully encapsulates some of the central issues at the heart of political criticism both in Forster's time and in our own. Who is the “we” with responsibilities and for whom or what is that “we” responsible? What exactly are these responsibilities? How local or global are they? How do they bring together the ethical and the political, the moral and the legal, duty and obligation, redress and hope for the future? How do the past, present, and future come together within this matrix of responsibilities? What kinds of political stances, posturings, or attitudes are in play? And what is the desired outcome or aim of political criticism? “We may have responsibilities”: in Forster, an equivocal or subjunctive “may” coupled with a frank admission and an expansive claim to amorphous “responsibilities” not only captures how open-ended and contradictory such assertions can be but also how tenuous their very ground always is. After all, Mrs. Herriton's sense of responsibility is highly disingenuous, the baby a pawn in her own power games.

For those of us for whom “literary Darwinism,” which bases its “scientific” approach to literary criticism on evolutionary psychology, has seemed an intellectual disaster, but who continue to believe that it is important to incorporate science cooperatively into our study of literature; for those who are concerned about how art and literature matter in a world so troubled and dangerous; for those convinced Darwinians who find themselves skeptical about and uneasy with the mechanico-materialist version of Darwinism that Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have made popular; for those who find that the science they credit is yet inadequately attentive to women's perspectives, Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty offers a potentially marvelous option. A distinguished ornithologist, Prum has undertaken an enormously ambitious project, whose implications run from evolutionary biology to aesthetics. From the perspective of a very unscientific literary guy and a wannabe birder, I slightly distrust my enthusiasm for the book. But Prum's arguments are creatively provocative and brilliantly argued, even when they get rather iffily hypothetical; his ornithological studies are intrinsically fascinating, even to nonbirders, and at the same time they have potentially transformative implications. What he has to say, even if his inferences can and should be challenged, deserves the most serious engagement.