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Deleuze on the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature: A Victorianist Perspective

In his essay "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature, " Gilles Deleuze privileges English and American literatures as a kind of counter-archive where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy, also where the contact zones of philosophy are negotiated. Anglo-American literature therefore appears to constitute a critical apparatus (dispositif) that preempts, even invalidates, the attempts to found English and American studies as disciplines in their own right ; in consequence, English and American studies emerge in this Deleuzian perspective as a curious economy of knowledge based in surplus and structured in metonymy. I test this proposition against a number of Victorian texts (Carlyle, Dickens, Arnold). They all address revolution as a political event of the first order which presses on the archival logic. Yet the revolution as they see it presses on memory regimes precisely in the positions where archives - unlike revolutions - depend on downgrading metonymy and on processing surplus out of existence. While this particular assemblage calls for a more nuanced reading of surplus and metonymy in Victorian culture, now in terms of politics and memory, it also demands that Deleuze's approach to Anglo- American literature be reassessed: not in order to invalidate it, but rather to call attention to its own implicit economy of knowledge.

Victorian literature, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold

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