New Materialisms and Scalar Collapse in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

The materialist turn in contemporary literary theory – comprising of multiple discourses such as new materialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism, affect theory, and others – has been deeply influential in the field of nineteenth-century American literature. However, one key tension within these materialist theories is the question of its politics: how does a turn to materialism, which privileges the actual physical matter of bodies and things over the ideological and linguistic categories of ideas, advance any political or ethical imperatives? Is a world of matter a world without human meaning? This chapter outlines both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this question in recent nineteenth-century American literary study. It then seeks to redraw the political impasse between them as one of scale. To that end, I examine two mid-century texts – the anonymously authored “The Ultra-Moral Reformer” (1842) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx” (1846) – as depictions of the challenges (and opportunities) of scalar distortion. These texts suggest that the political and ethical impasse within materialism can be described within materialist terms itself, and that doing so offers a way of understanding the value judgments inherent in materialist methodological commitments as scale dependent.