Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830 10.1 (2020) n.p.

Abstract

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” [see Digital Pedagogy] an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation and the multiple narrative-making experiences of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and why Swift’s poem seemed an appropriate site for such experimentation. Crucial to game construction is a commitment to theories of feminist game design that complement the poem’s own indictment of sexist determinism. With meditations on the affinity between poems and games, an examination of preceding experiments of literary translation into the ludic digital, details on game construction, and local objectives, this article reflects on how digital mediation suggests a self-conscious mode of reading as a phenomenon of fictional world-building. 

Restoration 41.1 (2017), pp. 5-28.

Abstract

Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree of self-satisfaction in her writing and an unprecedented disregard for her readers’ opinions. While her authorial self-fashioning is often dismissed as self-involved, aristocratic snobbery, I propose an alternative reading that understands Cavendish’s claims of self-sufficiency and self-pleasure as endeavoring to craft a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority. My construction of a skeptical Cavendish investigates a crucial distinction in her work between the pleasures of invention and the promise of pleasure through imitation. This affective distinction gives rise to analogies in her writing among texts, women writers, and colonial subjects, encouraging reflection on how we read texts and how we read one another. With emphasis on textual sovereignty, Cavendish depicts two socialities of reading: imperial conquest and witty conversation. By using satiric indirection to destabilize authorized categories of interpretation, Cavendish, I suggest, not only re-imagines the affective agency of readers and authors, but also conceives of a sociability that privileges the pleasures of writing and the imaginative potential of individual creators and what Cavendish calls “creatoresses.”

The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55 (2014), pp. 355-376.

Abstract

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a novel famous for making its readers, characters, and even the author, laugh and smile. This article examines the comic pleasure of misunderstanding in the novel, illustrating that misunderstanding rather than understanding is the foundation of the theory of sociability Sterne proposes. 

Philological Quarterly 89 (2010), pp. 263-281

Abstract

In his first novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), Henry Fielding identifies all vice as the result of affectation and traces the source of affectation to two causes: hypocrisy and vanity.  His comic critique of hypocrisy has received considerable critical attention. Less recognized, however, is Fielding’s critique of vanity as a moral complication to empirical understanding. His novels detail how vanity tacitly influences categories of judgment to promote self-interested interpretations and limit critical self-reflection. People cannot, therefore, accurately determine the moral quality of their acts, often mistaking their worst vices as their best virtues. To correct this tendency, Fielding advances a mode of pedagogical skepticism throughout his comic fictions that unmakes, rather than inculcates convictions, and ultimately calls into question the efficacy and motives of the more traditional pedagogical practices employed by his contemporaries.