About

Gary Handwerk is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington, with affiliations in the French & Italian Studies department. He holds a PhD from Brown University. His research interests include comparative literature, cinema, media studies, and French & Italian studies. He is involved in various academic activities within the university, including teaching and departmental service. His contact information includes an email address at handwerk@u.washington.edu and a phone number (206) 543-2690. His office is located in PDL A101, and he maintains a profile on the Comparative Literature department website.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• Law
• History
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• The Shortest Way with Defoe: “Robinson Crusoe,” Deism, and the Novel

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • History

  Michael B. Prince’s study The Shortest Way with Defoe is an extraordinary accomplishment. Depicting Defoe as an archironist, Prince’s study measures Defoe’s ironies with precision, designedly treading a trail of speculations that might well have delighted Defoe himself. It is, in fact, the sort of work Defoe might even have written had he turned his considerable talents to the field of literary criticism and taken himself as his subject. The result is one of the most intelligent, provocative, deeply researched, and—a word one rarely feels tempted to use in the context of reviewing—pleasurable works of literary and historical analysis that I have had the good fortune to read in recent years.Erudite without being weighty, highly readable and remarkably clear on even the most tangled of topics, The Shortest Way with Defoe is innovative in its reframing of an author for whom oceans of criticism already exist. Prince’s study rests on the core conceit (much in the spirit of its subject) that Defoe’s career path as a novelist can be traced to a highly personal antipathy toward one of his most vituperative nemeses, Charles Leslie, the noted Tory cleric and polemicist. That Leslie’s critiques of Defoe hounded him across his life seems indubitable, as Prince amply documents. That Defoe took these attacks as deeply to heart as Prince argues may be less certain. But whether Leslie was the primary target of Defoe’s wrath and the proximate cause of his literary works matters less than the skill with which Prince uses this lens to relocate Defoe within literary history and to reenvision modern European narrative history from this perspective.Discussing a broad range of Defoe’s fiction (starting with the early satirical essay The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which landed him in prison), The Shortest Way with Defoe deploys in its design many elements of narrative structure and psychological characterization that Defoe himself deployed so ingeniously in his novels. It is a notable work of scholarship, abundantly provisioned with notes that indicate Prince’s familiarity with eighteenth-century European literary studies and the history of the novel, as well as with the ideological and theological debates that lie behind these histories. But it is at the same time an academic version of Defoe’s own experiments with narrative—mystery fiction, spy novel, science fiction, roman à clef, and other popular literary genres—and is propelled by the same devices of suspense and imaginative fantasy that underlie the appeal of these forms.This Shortest Way consists of an introduction and a methodological conclusion bracketing four chapters, each devoted to one key work of Defoe’s from 1702 to 1720. Prince’s readings are rich in detail about the context and reception of each work and conversant with the many strands of contemporary criticism on each. He is especially illuminating on Defoe’s less successful and more neglected works: his lunar-voyage satire The Consolidator (1705) and his contributions to the multivolume, multiauthor Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718). On both, Prince offers persuasive insights into Defoe’s possible intentions in adopting the guise of these offbeat genres and on how and why these experiments went awry. Prince’s discussion of the lunar voyage in the context of Lucianic satire shows the value of his deep knowledge of literary history and the equal value of linking that knowledge to contemporary approaches like semiotics. His comparison of Swift’s and Defoe’s uses of allegorical satire and nonallegorical satire, respectively, alertly captures and connects their contrasting formal and ideological purposes. The subsequent discussion of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy makes brilliant use of Srinivas Aravamudan’s work on the cosmopolitan novel to explore what Prince terms the “singularity” of Defoe’s characters (105) as they couch their dissenting perspectives within an assertion of the truth value such singularity enables.Although Defoe’s deist tendencies (Prince defines deism as a commitment to some form of natural religion and a rejection specifically of Trinitarian beliefs) are at the core of the analysis, Prince is not (at least not primarily) offering an argument about Defoe’s personal beliefs. He contends instead that Defoe’s strategic appropriation of deist arguments and genres was instrumental to his polemical purposes. Thus “Defoe’s mortal battle with Charles Leslie led him to deploy rhetorical weapons of known deist association” (100). Prince claims convincingly that the imprisonment and pillorying that followed the publication of The Shortest Way with Dissenters left Defoe traumatized and cautious yet eager for revenge—provided he could minimize his risk of political retribution. Hence the ironic “ventriloquizing” (14) and masking that marked all of Defoe’s subsequent narrative ventures. In this regard, his mixed method of allegory and counterallegory gave him deniability with respect to his intentions.Yet the ruse was transparent to his adversaries (more so, Prince contends, than subsequent critics have acknowledged). Prince offers considerable evidence that Defoe was perceived by his foes as a deist. “While one could be a leveler without being a deist and a deist without being a leveler, Defoe’s enemies accuse him of both” (136). His writings, fiction and nonfiction alike, were for them Trojan horses filled with deist skepticism.This specific historical claim rests on a more general hermeneutic understanding of the intimate connection of form, content, and ideology in literature. While specific literary forms are, for Prince, ideologically neutral, they do lend themselves more and less well to particular ideological stances. Prince draws on modern theorists (Bakhtin and others) to frame this discussion, arguing that both genres and modes of interpretation were recognized by Defoe and his antagonists as ideologically loaded. Thus “for Leslie, typology is to representation what the Trinity is to faith” (167).Here is where Prince walks most clearly in Defoe’s path—and with comparable ingenuity. This work of criticism is itself a mystery or spy novel, a hermeneutic puzzle, a psychological case study, and more. It is in its own way a lesson that “right reading” cannot be univocal, for the human mind (at least one like Defoe’s) is not of a single mind with itself. As Prince says in discussing Defoe’s assimilation of Menippean satire, “Defoe’s contraptions show special interest in cognition, in picturing the mind at work” (81). Or, in discussing the post–Robinson Crusoe Serious Reflections, “His approach to these problems [apparitions] veers toward psychology and away from divinity” (222). Inhabiting the consciousness and style of others, Defoe became the penetrating precursor of the most characteristic component of the modern novel, psychoanalysis.Despite presenting itself as a single-author study within British literary history, The Shortest Way with Defoe is visibly much more. Its conclusion builds on Erich Auerbach’s idea of an Ansatzpunkt to clarify the theory of reading that underlies this text. “The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy” (quoted on 209). While acknowledging predecessors from Ian Watt on, Prince shifts our sense of Defoe as a writer (his sources of inspiration, his purposes, his modes, his styles) and of his place in British literary history. Prince’s Defoe remains, to be sure, a journalist-novelist or spiritual autobiographer. But this Defoe is more fundamentally driven by his sustained engagement in the theological and political debates of his time, so that we need to rectify “the absence of deism from our received histories of the novel” (116).This study also suggests alternative histories of modern European narratives. These would depart from Cervantes and proceed through Robinson Crusoe and on to Rousseau and Romantic fiction—especially German Romanticism, with its elaborate theorizing of Romantic irony, where we see a similar “transition from irony as a figure of speech to irony as a sustained narrative invention, situated in a genre or a combination of genres that fostered the same poise or balance between alternatives at the structural level” (54; what Friedrich Schlegel termed Schweben, or what Prince later notes was called “equivalence” by classical skepticism). This Shortest Way opens out as well into revisionary accounts of other major realist writers—Meredith’s early experimentation with “Oriental” genres, or Disraeli’s late appropriation of the same—where future critics might treat differently authors’ experimental bases for literary-historical success, seeing anew works that may have long been regarded as failures. For Prince’s rereadings of Defoe’s lunar-voyage and spy narratives are critically programmatic. As he says, “Failure never gets enough credit. . . . A preoccupation with success skews our understanding of both the artist’s development and cultural history” (49). Prince’s text has, moreover, considerable (if implicit) contemporary relevance in an era marked once again by religiously driven conflicts and exhibiting manifold tendencies toward theological dogmatism and theocratic aspirations. We, like Defoe, badly need what Prince describes as “alternative” forms that might escape or exceed “the prism of party politics and ideology” (132).To return, however, to the question of plausibility: how much does it matter how much credence a reader gives to the most suppositious of Prince’s assertions about figures like Leslie or Henry Sacheverell, whom Prince finds, for instance, behind the admittedly mysterious wolves and bear that show up at the end of Robinson Crusoe? Or to his suppositions about Defoe’s ties to William Penn and Quakerism, or to Defoe’s familiarity with Rosicrucianism? These are hard questions to pose to an avowed disciple of irony, who asserts that the wolves and bear are “an act of undetectable literary revenge” (204) yet elsewhere says simply that Defoe exhibits “a far more playful attitude toward religion than [his] apologists allow” (220). Yet the embrace of suggestiveness may be Prince’s most Defoe-like trait. However valid the Defoe-Leslie key may be, one level of irony need not cancel other interpretive possibilities. Defoe as Puritan, as colonialist, or as racist European imperialist—these and other personae remain visible behind Prince’s Defoe. One is grateful to a critic who can conclude about his subject that he is, fundamentally, “contradictory, opaque to himself” (161)—as, indeed, are we all.

  PublisherDOI

• Nietzsche on Nature

  Literature Compass · 2016-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract philosophy has traditionally been seen as oriented toward human (all too human) affairs, nature present in it as backdrop or atmosphere, but not on its own terms a central focus of his work. Yet Nietzsche was well informed about the natural science of his era and particularly attuned to the importance of figures such as Charles Darwin. Building upon John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism , this essay explores the relation between Nietzsche's ethics, psychology, and philosophy of history and Darwinian evolutionary theory – not just Darwin as understood by the 19th‐century reception of his ideas (heavily shaped by social Darwinist ideologies), but as foundational for a contemporary understanding of ecological and environmental concerns. Anticipating some of the implications of Darwinian thought in the 20th century, Nietzsche's writings help sharpen our awareness of the tensions between social and natural selection, biological and social diversity, and (genetic) fate and (willed) destiny – all crucial for environmental debates of the 21st century.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene”

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2014-11-01

  articleOpen access
  Publisher

• Introduction: “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene”

  Environmental Humanities · 2014-05-01 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft by Tilottama Rajan (review)

  University of Toronto Quarterly · 2013-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Human, all too human II and unpublished fragments from the period of Human, all too human II (spring 1878-fall 1879)

  Medical Entomology and Zoology · 2012-10-31 · 16 citations

  bookSenior author

  Volume 4 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche contains two works, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), originally published separately, then republished together in the 1886 edition of Nietzsche's works. They mingle aphorisms drawn from notebooks of 1875-79, years when worsening health forced Nietzsche toward an increasingly solitary existence. Like its predecessor, Human, All Too Human II is above all an act of resistance not only to the intellectual influences that Nietzsche felt called upon to critique, but to the basic physical facts of his daily life. It turns an increasingly sharply formulated genealogical method of analysis toward Nietzsche's persistent concerns-metaphysics, morality, religion, art, style, society, politics and culture. The notebook entries included here offer a window into the intellectual sources behind Nietzsche's evolution as a philosopher, the reading and self-reflection that nourished his lines of thought. The linking of notebook entries to specific published aphorisms, included in the notes, allows readers of Nietzsche in English to trace for the first time the intensive process of revision through which he transformed raw notebook material into the finely crafted sequences of aphoristic reflection that signal his distinctiveness as a philosophical stylist.

  Publisher

• Inventions of the Imagination: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Imaginary since Romanticism

  2011-01-01 · 1 citations

  article
  Publisher

• 4. ‘Awakening the Mind’: William Godwin’s Enquirer

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2011-12-31 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2010-11-15 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| December 01 2010 Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global.By Ursula K. Heise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. viii + 250 pp. Gary Handwerk Gary Handwerk Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2010) 71 (4): 492–495. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2010-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Gary Handwerk; Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 2010; 71 (4): 492–495. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2010-028 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search University of Washington2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• M. O. Grenby. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-80351-9. Price: US$65.00.

  Romanticism on the Net · 2005-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  M. O. Grenby. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-80351-9. Price: US$65.00.. Un article de la revue Romanticism on the Net (Numéro 40, november 2005) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Marshall Brown

  4 shared

• Sabine Wilke

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Greg Garrard

  University of British Columbia

  2 shared

• David Simpson

  University of Colorado Boulder

  2 shared

• Walker Gibson

  1 shared

• Paul H. Fry

  1 shared

• Herbert Lindenberger

  1 shared

• Nicholas Halmi

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., French Literature

  University of California, Berkeley

  1990

• M.A., French Literature

  University of California, Berkeley

  1986

• B.A., French and Italian

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1983