The market in merit: Intelligence and professionalism in the mid-Victorian novel

详细信息   

• 作者：Ruth ; Jennifer Helen
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2000
• 关键词：Social sciences ; Language ; literature and linguistic
• 导师：Armstrong,Nancy
• 毕业院校：Brown University
• 专业：British and Irish literature;Sociology;Science history
• ISBN：9780599941915,059994191X
• CBH：9987833
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：10732443
• Pages：236

文摘

Arguing that a new professional class and an understanding of intelligence as a measurable capacity are mutually constitutive,this dissertation traces the mid-century novel's attempt to fashion the calculating intelligence of the businessman into the disinterested intelligence of the professional. Chapter one argues that Charlotte Bront?'s The Professor converts the industrial model with its accompanying economic capital into an academic model capable of both disclosing and producing cultural capital. Capitalizing on a mid-century confusion between the manual,the mechanical,and the mental,Bront? rationalizes intelligence,re-organizing the mind so that it might better fit a new middle-class figure. Chapter two turns from a focus on industrial and mental space to industrial and mental time,arguing that while the professional mind is understood as a form of mental capital,the labor of the professional must obey factory time. Charles Dickens's David Copperfield enjoys the prestige of mental capital even as he lays claim to the merits of laborious knowledge acquisition. The next two chapters move from the late 1840s to the late 1850s,when Victorians concern themselves as much with consumption as with production. Intelligence,I argue,comes to be viewed in the more ambivalent terms of exchange,the terms of the market in which products are bought and sold rather than the factory in which they are made. Chapter three examines the concern that the Northcote-Trevelyan Report's proposal to reform the civil service by replacing patronage with competitive examinations will result not in the identification of "general intelligence" but in a degrading "traffic in brains." Anthony Trollope's The Three Clerks sets the examination's alienating commodification against a good kind of consumption,an "affirmative culture" that enables the professional to disavow self-interest. Chapter four finds Dickens furthering the project to distance the professional from the market by transforming "self-sacrifice" from a component of the feminine emotions into a product of the professional intellect. Appropriating this virtue from the private sphere and placing that sphere under siege,A Tale of Two Cities can offer "self-sacrifice" as a public service.