About

Stuart Burrows is a Professor of English at Brown University who teaches classes on nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction and poetry, the history of photography, film, and literary theory. His research explores the ways in which visual media and literature intersect, particularly focusing on how the invention of the camera transformed American writers' conception of representation. His first book, 'A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography,' examines this transformation from 1839 to 1945. His second book, 'Henry James and the Promise of Fiction,' analyzes how Henry James rethought moral and narrative promises in the nineteenth-century novel. Burrows's scholarly work includes essays published in various journals and edited collections, discussing topics such as American literature, film, and authors like Henry James, Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, and Willa Cather. His broader research interests include personhood in the nineteenth century, with a focus on Herman Melville, and film studies, particularly the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, André Tarkovsky, and Agnes Varda. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MA from Northeastern University, and a BA from the University of Southampton. Burrows is affiliated with several scholarly organizations, including the Modern Language Association, Modernist Studies Association, and the Henry James Society.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Mathematics
• Epistemology
• Linguistics
• Art
• Psychoanalysis
• Literature
• Law
• History

Selected publications

• The Will to Power

  NOVEL A Forum on Fiction · 2024-11-01

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  In her field-changing first book, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism, Jennifer L. Fleissner placed female identity at the center of the most masculine of genres: American naturalism. Women, Compulsion, Modernity made the stunning argument that the trajectory of female characters in naturalist novels is not one of decline—the term critics typically use to characterize naturalist plots—but stasis, “ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion” (9). Fleissner pointed to Carrie in her rocking chair in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” going round and round her room; Edna Pontellier going “on and on and on” into the water at the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening; the compulsive repetitions of Trina in Frank Norris's McTeague; Lily Bart's vacillations in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth; Melanctha's repetitions in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. In a stroke, naturalist determinism became naturalist compulsion.Whereas Women, Compulsion, Modernity maintained a tight focus on the late nineteenth century, the story Fleissner tells in her impressive new work, Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, covers an extraordinary amount of historical, philosophical, and critical ground. The “philosophical trajectory of the will begins in Saint Augustine” (ix), she instructs us, and ends in our current critical moment. Scale aside, there are clear links between the two books. Fleissner cites with approval Leo Bersani's claim that the protagonists of the American novel possess either an “energetic excess of being” (Bersani 70) or an “equally unnerving” (16) “stillness” (80), the latter formulation strikingly similar to the account of naturalist character in Women, Compulsion, Modernity in terms of “stuckness” (9). “If Bersani is right,” Fleissner suggests, “character itself—individuality—may be . . . the source of [the novel's] deepest strangeness” (16). We should stop thinking that “the novel is synonymous with realism” (17), she proposes, and start conceiving of its relation to other genres, such as the romance, the term most often used to characterize American fiction. Such a recalibration would place American fiction where it belongs, not as extraneous to the history of the novel—Fleissner herself begins her chapter on Herman Melville by asking, “Is Moby-Dick a novel?” (146)—but central to it. As Fleissner sees it, “the American novel in fact has arguably far more overlap with Continental fiction [than with British realism], for, as has long been noted, it never quite makes the transition to realism from romance. . . . It also joins Balzac, Dostoevsky, and others in remaining in greater contact with the philosophical tradition” (17).Maladies of the Will is a learned book—perhaps too learned. Consider the following passage, from near the beginning of Fleissner's chapter on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: [Our] genealogy will take us from the nominalists of the fourteenth century, and Petrarch's dialogue with Augustine at the dawn of the Renaissance, through to the seventeenth-century writings that would establish the significance of interiority and lay the groundwork for the early novel. . . . We will then see how the eighteenth century, drawing on writers like Locke and Shaftesbury, strove to manage that interiority in order to conceive it as the grounding for modern political and social life. And finally, then, we will be in a position to consider its reemergence in those later eighteenth-century works through which we can, at last, understand Hawthorne's novel: not only gothic fiction, but Kant's moral philosophy. (51)“At last,” indeed! Although such an itinerary is unnerving, the reader is reassured by Fleissner's serious, intellectually responsible approach. She shows herself to be equally at home discussing Giorgio Agamben's belief in potentiality as, say, Lionel Trilling's debt to Friedrich Nietzsche.Attempting to summarize Fleissner's history of the will is not for the fainthearted. She proposes that “the familiar lineaments of the ‘modern individual,’ so often derived from Descartes or Locke, in fact represent a reaction against the stranger conception of a newly individuated self to be found in writings like Augustine's” (26); traces “a trajectory from maladies of excessive will . . . to ones of the will's deficiency” (xiv) across the nineteenth century; criticizes the “contemporary intellectual landscape” for regarding “the will, no less than the novel . . . to be merely a relic of nineteenth-century ideals” (10); and charts a path between Ian Watt's contention that the novel's emergence in the eighteenth century is inseparable from that of the modern individual “striving to fulfill its own self-interest in an increasingly secular world” and Michel Foucault's account of “subjectivation,” in which identity is, “essentially, self-subjection” (3). One of the most impressive aspects of Fleissner's account of such histories is her refusal to collapse into each other the various oppositions that interest her. Take, for example, two modes of thought central to Fleissner's project: “The Lockean emphasis on a will straightforwardly fulfilling itself as practical reason . . . [and] the sentimental injunction to surrender will altogether in favor of a feelingful merger with a larger whole” (35). Fleissner notes that both these views of the self have provoked “strong critiques,” since their view of the subject can be seen either “as overly self-defined, on the one hand, or overly constrained, on the other.” Such criticisms inevitably “have the effect of returning us to the opposing version” (3). But rather than seeing these dualities as inevitably false, Fleissner extends and enriches them by outlining what they owe to writers and schools of thought seemingly quite distant from them, such as Saint Augustine's Confessions or the severe self-examinations of the Puritans.Fleissner's interest in the Puritans results in a powerful new reading of The Scarlet Letter, the subject of her first chapter. Her account of Hawthorne's novel begins by asking a fascinating question: What if a novel “were to pressure the boundaries of [fiction] not by refusing the . . . category of interiority, but by hyperbolizing it?” (48). Hester Prynne's problem is that she thinks too much, leading her into what Hawthorne refers to as a “moral wilderness” (Scarlet Letter 170). As Fleissner puts it, “How was it that the very strategy we think of as most reliably humanizing fictional characters here had the opposing result?” (48). She finds an analog for Hester's predicament in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which “interiority . . . becomes the very source of anxious torment, because interiority—one's thoughts, more than one's actual misdeeds—also appears in a new way as the primary staging ground for the will, and, hence, potentially the very site of sin itself” (62).This notion that critics have overlooked theological works in their accounts of the novel is also central to Fleissner's second chapter, which explores what she insists is a greatly underrated work, Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons. Fleissner reads Stoddard's text as a bildungsroman, though a rather odd one, “a story of recovery” rather than triumph, “a story . . . not of ‘onward and upward’ but one of stumbles, fits, and (re)starts” (126). Such attention to the elasticity of genre is also evident in the last chapter of Maladies of the Will, which examines a return to romance at the fin-de-siècle evident in works such as Paul Laurence Dunbar's Sport of the Gods, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.As impressive as her readings of these texts often are, Fleissner's true gift as a critic is her ability to chart the development of a writer's thinking across a career, or the reasons why one school of thought emerges at a particular moment. A particularly compelling example can be found in chapter 4, a large part of which is devoted to Henry James's The Ambassadors. Here Fleissner pays long overdue attention to Bersani's extraordinary 1975 work A Future for Astyanax. Bersani reads James as a novelist of manners, much as Trilling had done years earlier. Unlike Trilling, however, Bersani draws a causal link between James's account of an often-bruising social world and “the withdrawal into a space of thought” undertaken by so many of his characters, which he sees “as a means of achieving the more radicalized freedom the social world finally rebuffs” (232–33). “The crucial point in Bersani's argument,” Fleissner notes, is that, in a strange irony, this very freedom functions as a form of reenslavement. For, in retreating into itself, the Jamesian “I” could be said to disappear, to become indistinguishable from what Bersani refers to as “the neutral territory occupied by language” (Bersani 146). Rather deftly, Fleissner points out that this “ethical critique” of James's work is reversed in the powerful readings that Bersani produced near the end of his life, which make “equally strong claims on behalf of these texts’ ethical virtues” (235–36).The starting point of chapter 3, on Moby-Dick, is another opposition, this one taken from Hegel. Fleissner notes that “self-denial, [the] merger of the individual into a greater totality . . . and the self-inflation of the Romantic artist represent, for Hegel, two sides of the same problem” (161). Hegel thus could be said to place “the opposition between self and non-self” within rather than without (167). Fleissner reads Ahab as a fictional exemplification of this seeming paradox. He both externalizes his self by making the crew swear to make his will theirs and internalizes the world by having the very thing he chases become part of his own body—his whalebone leg. Fleissner's restaging of this Hegelian opposition recalls Sharon Cameron's study The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne, which counterposed Melville's work to that of Hawthorne in similar terms: “The fantasy in Moby Dick is that human identities might be joined by a Siamese ligature, following which all men, fused, will be squeezed ‘into each other.’ . . . The fantasy of Hawthorne's tales is that all selves might be joined, not by corporeal enlargement but rather by corporal diminution in which the self is distilled to a representative bodily organ—for example, to Ethan Brand's heart” (Cameron 2–3).The most memorable of the readings offered in Women, Compulsion, Modernity was of Frank Norris's McTeague, and Fleissner happily returns to Norris's work in Maladies of the Will. Chapter 5 largely consists of an analysis of Vandover and the Brute. Fleissner makes the compelling argument that Vandover's strange decline—he ends up naked on all fours in his room howling like a wolf—is “because of rather than despite the fact that he begins the novel a ‘good’ boy from a good family who diligently says his prayers nightly” (278). Seen this way, Vandover unfolds according to a very different logic than the fascination with hereditariness that governs the novels of Émile Zola, the writer to whom Norris was most often compared. Fleissner takes up the work of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who famously argued that what distinguishes human beings from animals is “not simply [that we] want to do something but [that we] ‘want to want to’ do something” (qtd. 313). At times, that is, we want to have different wants than the ones we have. Upholding Frankfurt's distinction would seem to be particularly important in the naturalist world, one in which the boundary between people and animals is strangely permeable, as Vandover's fate demonstrates. Yet Fleissner points out that the desire to “‘want to want to’ do something” is so persistent in Vandover that, rather than serving as a marker of difference from nonhuman life, it is a crucial element in Norris's hero's decline. “If anything keeps ‘beginning all over again’ in Vandover,” she contends, “it is the idea of beginning all over again. The idea of the break with compulsively repeated habits . . . seems itself to generate yet another structure of repetition” (313). Even the desire to break free from compulsion is itself a compulsion. One of the unnerving lessons of Maladies of the Will is that our own self-help age, which repeatedly counsels us to change our habits, renders us all naturalist subjects, stuck helplessly in place.

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• Conclusion

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-26

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  My conclusion consists of a brief analysis of perhaps James's most famous short story: "The Figure in the Carpet." Here I argue that, for James, the promise of art is the only promise in which we can place our trust. The difficulty this poses is that such a promise can only be spoken by others, never by us.

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• Describe and Narrate

  NOVEL A Forum on Fiction · 2023-08-01

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  It has been more than a decade since Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus called on critics to practice what they called “surface reading” (13); in the intervening years their manifesto has been cited more than sixteen hundred times. Surface reading has been welcomed, critiqued, attacked, and defended. It has rarely, however, been put into practice. When new historicism was in vogue there seemed to be plenty of new historicists around to read and debate, just as a few years earlier there seemed to be plenty of poststructuralists, and earlier still any number of new critics. But where are the surface readers? Aside from Heather Love's engaging essays on description in the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, it is hard to find many examples of the kind of reading called for by Best and Marcus.Or at least it was. Although Dora Zhang goes out of her way to insist that she is “not especially invested in championing description as an alternative to any other kind of reading practice, nor do I want to hold it up as a critical model” (58), her highly impressive first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, represents by far the most thoughtful and imaginative response to “Surface Reading: An Introduction” that I have read. Zhang notes that her “book is distinguished from the post-critique debates by taking literary description as an object of analysis rather than a method” (58). But her own method, which involves foregoing “comprehensive interpretations of single novels” and ignoring “questions of plot, theme, or character,” gives an exciting sense of the possibilities of reading along the lines imagined by Best and Marcus. Zhang declares that she is “primarily interested in tracing recurrent patterns and structures across descriptive passages,” doing so “to isolate the assumptions these forms embed and to trace the effects they create” (54). An example of an embedded assumption, she observes, would be Marcel Proust's belief that social relations are fundamentally analogical; an example of a created effect would be the strange, portentous atmosphere in which Henry James's late fiction takes place. Zhang devotes a chapter to each of these subjects, writing about Proust and James with skill and precision. But it is striking how careful she is not to arrive at any grand conclusions about the worlds created by these most demanding of writers.Strange Likeness also owes a debt to affect studies, though here again Zhang is careful to distinguish her approach from that taken by other critics with whom she is broadly in sympathy. She makes the inarguable point that, despite all the critical attention that questions of affect have received in the past twenty years or so, “the precise contours of its formal expression in literature are not always clear” (117). Zhang, in contrast, is wonderfully attentive to questions of form, and in particular to the question of temporality. She tracks what she refers to as fiction's “heterogeneous temporalities” across a series of works, most notably The Golden Bowl and Mrs. Dalloway, registering in the process their various changes of scale and “affective intensity” (44). The critic her approach most often recalls is Eve Sedgwick—I am thinking in particular of the essays collected in the volume The Weather in Proust—and it is a real pleasure to spend time with a reader so willing to avoid imposing preconceived views on such complex and contradictory works of fiction.The closest Zhang comes to offering what we might think of as a traditional reading is at the very end of her account of Remembrance of Things Past. Having argued that Proust's rhetorical figures are classical in structure—that they conform to Aristotle's definition of analogy in The Poetics, “A is to B as C is to D” (93)—Zhang observes that these likenesses often prove insignificant, that they “reveal no higher-order law and offer no transcendence” (115). Yet precisely because nothing seems to depend on them, Proust's analogies work not unlike poetry in Robert Frost's famous definition: they offer “the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew” (777). Or as Zhang puts it, a Proustian metaphor “reminds [the reader] of something she didn't know she had forgotten, triggers some surprising association, relates some far-flung experiences, and perhaps opens up an unknown world. We might even call them involuntary descriptions. Disowned by the narrator within the theory but bearing witness to his essential temperament, for the reader it is the descriptive texture of the novel that holds the truest possibility of an encounter with the Proustian real” (115–16). The notion of an “involuntary description” is rather deft, suggesting as it does that “the descriptive texture” of Remembrance of Things Past works on the reader in much the way that the madeleine works on Marcel. I'm not quite sure what is at stake in calling this “the Proustian real,” but Zhang's account of the shape of Proust's novel is illuminating.The backbone of Strange Likeness is a comprehensive rethinking of Georg Lukács's famous distinction between narration and description in his 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” Zhang offers the following highly lucid summary of Lukács's argument: “Because narration alone is concerned with the unfolding of human actions, for Lukács it is the sole means of conveying the dynamism and flux of historical becoming. Description, by contrast, can only mortify the dialectical movement of history; human beings thus become objectified while objects are lavishly depicted for their own sake” (37). Zhang contends that this opposition falls apart when we read modernist fiction, whose descriptions possess the dynamism Lukács associates with narration. Rather than describing objects, modernist writers describe “relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena” (6). Her readings of James, Proust, and Virginia Woolf bear this out. But Zhang's decision to limit what she is calling modernism to these three writers, capacious as they might be, rather undermines the revised literary history she puts forward in Strange Likeness. She argues that descriptions such as the famous account of the boardinghouse in the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac's 1835 novel Père Goriot, “which sets the stage before the action proper begins,” are not a feature of modernist fiction, in which “such set pieces of mise-en-scène tend either to disappear or to become defamiliarized” (48). But in the absence of any engagement with writers beyond Proust, James, and Woolf, this assertion is somewhat unconvincing. What of the work of William Faulkner, or Willa Cather, or Nella Larsen, or Ernest Hemingway, all of whose fiction includes long and detailed descriptions, even if at times they disparage the realist project?Consider for example the opening lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 Tender Is the Night: On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. (3)There are any number of ways to read this description. The striking absence of human beings, for example, primes us for the astonishing disappearance of Fitzgerald's hero, Dick Diver, at the end of the novel; the shifts in time between the present moment of narration and the past moment being narrated anticipate the temporal experimentation performed in the novel itself, which includes a lengthy flashback. But whatever we might say about this passage, it is surely as concrete—or almost as concrete—as any in Balzac: Fitzgerald specifies the color of the hotel, its distance from Cannes, its varying clientele.My point in bringing up Tender Is the Night is not to pick holes in Zhang's argument, but simply to note that the force of this highly impressive study lies less in its attempt to reimagine literary history than in its convincing takedown of Lukács's dismissal of the value of description. At one point Zhang quotes the philosopher Ian Hacking, who, in a gloss on Elizabeth Anscombe's famous definition of intentionality as acting under a description, observes that “if a description is not there, then intentional actions under that description cannot be there either” (quoted on 29). As Zhang glosses this idea, “if new modes of description come into being, new possibilities for action come into being” (29). Such modes are not limited to words; Zhang quotes Woolf's reflection that the work of Paul Cézanne “stirs words in us where we thought none to exist” (123). Description is not a matter of reproducing the world but of remaking and reimagining it. Lukács's disparaging of description is not just wrong, it is predicated on a distinction which simply does not hold up.Zhang devotes two chapters to Woolf, whose work she reads with great sensitivity. The first makes the point that “Woolf 's descriptive images . . . interrupt the intimacy with a character's thoughts and perceptions that is established by the use of free indirect discourse” (128). Description is not simply a pause in the action but a means of opening up a gap between narrator and character. This is particularly interesting in the case of Woolf, whose fiction, as Ann Banfield has argued so brilliantly, is inhabited at times by “subjective yet subjectless” perspective, one that, as Zhang observes, “only has meaning in reference to a speaker” (163) yet that cannot be assigned to a specific person. Zhang happily admits to the ways in which her reading of Woolf has been shaped by that of Banfield. But although, like Banfield, she engages at length with the work of Bertrand Russell, she does so in order to ask a very different set of questions. For what interests Zhang is not individual consciousness but the possibility of community.The final chapter of Strange Likeness is animated by a simple yet powerful question: “Are there limits to what can be described?” (144). The framework for this discussion is provided by Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance—that is, knowledge of which we are directly aware (such as memories)—and knowledge by description (such as other people's memories). Were we restricted to knowledge by acquaintance, Russell points out, “the experience of each moment” would be “a prison,” one whose boundaries would be that of “our present world” (quoted on 151). As Zhang movingly observes, “What is at stake in description then is a move from the private bounds of the self into the wider public world. This is also in many ways what novels seem to promise: the experience of the other, but rendered intimately as if experienced by the self; put otherwise, descriptions that aspire to the condition of acquaintance” (152). Or as Georges Poulet puts it in his entertaining but now rarely read 1969 essay “Phenomenology of Reading,” to be a reader of fiction is to inhabit “a consciousness astonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as though it were mine” (60).Zhang puts her model to the test by examining one of Woolf's signature moves: her repeated use of indexicals such as “this” or “there she was.” Russell's own term for indexicals, Zhang notes, is egocentric particulars, words whose “denotation is relative to the speaker” (216). “Strictly speaking,” Zhang observes, such terms are “mutually unintelligible” (154), since their meaning depends on the position, attitude, and sensations of the person who utters them. In Woolf's fiction, however, utterances such as “this,” “here,” and “now” function not as a sign of our separation from one another but of our connection to one another. They give a name to what Zhang refers to as “the indescribable” (34)—our inner life, what it feels like to inhabit the world from moment to moment. Rather than functioning as a limit point, Woolf's indexicals represent the final extension of literary description's project of “establishing a common world” (29), in that they imagine private experience as something shareable, communicable, and open to all. Such a thoughtful conclusion can hardly be said to stay merely on the surface of the text. But its generosity and openness are as far from the kinds of symptomatic reading critiqued by Best and Marcus as it is possible to imagine.

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• Promising to Love

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-26

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  The danger of viewing morality as provisional rather than permanent is explored in my fourth chapter, on The Wings of the Dove. I read the various promises in the novel as challenging rather than confirming J. L. Austin's theory of the speech act. The promise is Austin's most celebrated example of a statement that performs an action rather than offering a description. In The Wings of the Dove, however, description is itself an action, a means of shaping the world rather than merely reporting on it. As a result, the distinctive status of the promise dissolves, producing in James's antihero Merton Densher a damaging crisis of faith.

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• Bibliography

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-26

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• Apropos of something: a history of irrelevance and relevance

  Textual Practice · 2023 · 17 citations

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  • Political Science
  • Epistemology
  • History
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• Promising for Others

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-26

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  Chapter 2 focuses on the heroines of three James texts from the late 1890s, The Spoils of Poynton, In the Cage, and The Turn of the Screw. The lack of money and social standing of all three women exempt them from the realm in which promises are given and received, As a result, their duty is limited to ensuring that the people for whom they work recognize their own. This paradoxical notion of a promise given by proxy, as it were, accounts for the striking formal experiments performed by all three texts, the principal one being that all three heroines arrive too late for their own stories.

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• Notes

  2023-10-26

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• Henry James and the Promise of Fiction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-26

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  What is the relation between the novel and ethical thought? Henry James and the Promise of Fiction argues that the answer to this question lies not in the content of a work of fiction but in its form. Stuart Burrows explores the relationship between James's ethical vision and his densely metaphorical style, his experiments with narrative time, and his radical reimagining of perspective. Each chapter takes as its starting point a different aspect of an issue at the heart of moral philosophy: the act of promising. Engaging with a range of moral philosophers and literary theorists, most notably David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, Henry James and the Promise of Fiction argues that James's formal experimentation represents a significant contribution to ethical thought in its own right.

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• Promising to Lie

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-26

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  My fifth chapter analyses a very different kind of vow: what philosophers refer to as a wicked promise – a pledge to do harm. I argue that the self-defeating logic of such promises explains the peculiar form of James's last completed novel, The Golden Bowl. The world the wicked promise conjures into being is described by one character as "Evil – with a very big E,"a world in which keeping one's word becomes almost inconceivable. This explains why the novel ends with another promise altogether– that made by the Prince, who waits to see what world Maggie has prepared for him. The fact that this promise comes due beyond the end of the text suggests the limits of a promise to which no obligation attaches.

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