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Full Description
A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson's critical writing over four decades.
Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities—the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out.
Gathering Ferguson's most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, "The Nuclear Sublime," in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson's foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; "Pornography, the Theory," where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and "Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form," in which she analyzes Austen's use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of "over-knowing" others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.
A vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, Records of Reward will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.
Contents
Foreword (2026) by Wendy Anne Lee
Introduction: Aesthetics, Writing, Value
Chapter 1. The Nuclear Sublime
Chapter 2. Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form
Chapter 3. Emma, or Happiness (or Sex Work)
Chapter 4. Canons, Poetics, and Social Value: Jeremy Bentham and How to Do Things with People
Chapter 5. Rape and the Rise of the Novel
Chapter 6. Pornography, the Theory
Chapter 7. Coherence and Changes in the Unknown World
Chapter 8. Now It's Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading
Chapter 9. Not Kant, but Bentham: On Taste
Chapter 10. Bitcoin: A Reader's Guide (The Beauty of the Very Idea)
Chapter 11. Exit Talking: Bentham on His Auto-Icon
Chapter 12. A Conversation About Records of Reward: Essays on Literature and Value with Nate Crocker
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
