Frances Ferguson

Biographic Data

ID202798
NAMEFrances Ferguson
GIVEN NAMESFrances
FAMILY NAMEFerguson
SIGNATUREFERGUSON F
AFFILIATIONSJohns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS44
TOTAL CITATIONS38
AUTHOR COUNT43
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1963
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX3

  • Understanding Criticism

    Frances FergusonARTICLEGenre2024

    It is hard to imagine two critical books more different from one another. Michel Chaouli's Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins recounts a very intense classroom experience of talking about a text—or failing to talk about a text—and the thoughts that he develops out of that experience. Jonathan Kramnick's Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies homes in on conventions of literary critical writing to capture the fluency and vi…

  • Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2024

  • Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy

    R Howard Bloch, Frances FergusonBOOKMisogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy2023

  • Fiftieth Anniversary

    Bill Brown, Frances Ferguson et al.ARTICLECritical Inquiry2023

  • Distributing Legibility

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2023References: 3

    Stenography had been used for centuries to capture the words of orators, lecturers, and royals, but there was a significant expansion of the use of stenography in the eighteenth century. During the period when Samuel Richardson held the contract to report on decisions reached in the House of Commons, Thomas Gurney began transcribing the testimony of many speakers at trials in the Old Bailey. In this article, I suggest that Richardson, increasingl…

  • Bitcoin: A Reader's Guide (The Beauty of the Very Idea)

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2019Cited by: 1

  • Not Kant, but Bentham: On Taste

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2019Cited by: 4References: 5

    Austen’s novel points a humorously accusatory finger at novels that have worked up Catherine’s imagination, but a wider target here is the pleasure people take in having opinions and sharing opinions, most often about other people—and especially in feeling that they know other people better than others do and even better than those other people know themselves. The distinctive fictional device known as free indirect style or free indirect discour…

  • The Novel Comes of Age: When Literature Started Talking with Children

    Frances FergusonARTICLEdifferences2017References: 4

    The Novel Comes of Age" aims to discuss the importance of conversation as Anna Laetitia Barbauld instantiates it in her Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose for Children and in Evenings at Home, which she and her brother John Aikin jointly authored. As Barbauld lays out her account of the novel in her early treatment of the novel as a genre, she identifies the prominence of conversation as its distinctive feature. Exchanges-and particularly ex…

  • Now It’s Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2015Cited by: 3References: 9

  • Solitude and the Sublime: The Romantic Aesthetics of Individuation

    Frances FergusonBOOKSolitude and the Sublime2013

    As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

  • What Should I Do and What Was I Thinking? Philosophical Examples and the Uses of the Literary

    Frances FergusonARTICLEboundary 22013

    Philosophers frequently attempt to achieve clarity about particular problems in moral philosophy both by modeling specific hypothetical cases very exactly and by turning to literature for examples. Ferguson here relies on some of the work of Bernard Williams, Donald Davidson, and Candace Vogler to treat their various suggestions about moral problems and how literature might serve them. In particular, she observes that each of these philosophers s…

  • Too Much Information: Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet

    Frances FergusonARTICLEModern Language Notes2010

    Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet is a Tendenz-Roman without a clear proposition to espouse,1 or, as Jacques Neefs has said, a comedy of ideas.2 Its characters repeatedly endeavor to learn how to perform various actions—from handling grain that has just been harvested to finding items for a geological collection—and repeatedly fail. They are committed to self-improvement and to improvement in all things. Because they frequently consult some of the s…

  • Representation restructured

    Open AccessFrances FergusonCHAPTERThe Cambridge History of Romantic…2009

    John Stuart Mill, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, observes that 'these two men', though 'they agreed in being closet-students'. Mill's account helps to bring out certain similarities in their projects. Both were crucial participants in a massive change in the understanding of representation that occurred within their lives and those of their Romantic contemporaries. The various different kinds of attention to represen…

  • Ralph Cohen: Analyst of the Literary Field

    Frances FergusonARTICLENew Literary History2009

    Ralph CohenAnalyst of the Literary Field Frances Ferguson (bio) Put the case that there is a poem popular in its own time and for decades after its publication. Put the case that this popularity expressed itself in widespread quotation, so that the poem was frequently pulverized, so that it appeared in the form of epigraphs and other brief excerpts that larded other texts. Put the case that the circulation of these bits did not enhance appreciati…

  • Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text

    Frances FergusonARTICLENew Literary History2008Cited by: 1

    Franco moretti has recently dramatized difficult relation between literary history and reading at present moment, in process renewing all of our justified anxieties about exactly what can say about literature. Although Goethe called for advent of the age of world in 1827 and Marx and Engels saw a world literature arising many national and local in 1848, an ever-growing awareness of planetary interconnections in political, economic, and ethical li…

  • The Way We Love Now: Ian McEwan, Saturday, and Personal Affection in the Information Age

    Frances FergusonARTICLERepresentations2007

  • Jacques Derrida and the Critique of the Geometrical Mode: The Line and the Point

    Frances Ferguson, Ferguson et al.ARTICLECritical Inquiry2007References: 2

  • Why Is This Man So Angry? A Reply to Loren Glass

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2005

  • Coherence and Changes in the Unknown World

    Frances FergusonARTICLENew Literary History2004

    This essay undertakes to understand Foucault's interest in classification in The Order of Things as a contribution to debates about the availability of beliefs. If a standard defense of the possibility of religious belief involves claiming that religious belief does not need justification, it seems to make religious belief (and all sorts of beliefs about things that are not part of the world of experience) look as though it is a mere product of t…

  • On Getting Past Yes to Number One

    Frances Ferguson, Ferguson et al.ARTICLECritical Inquiry2004References: 2

  • The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant Meet Deleuze and Guattari

    Frances FergusonARTICLESouth Atlantic Quarterly2003Cited by: 1

    Research Article| January 01 2003 The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant Meet Deleuze and Guattari Frances Ferguson Frances Ferguson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2003) 102 (1): 215–234. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-102-1-215 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Frances Ferguson; The Afterlife of the Romantic Chi…

  • Emma, or Happiness (or Sex Work)

    Frances FergusonARTICLECritical Inquiry2002Cited by: 2References: 1

  • "A Reply to Tzvetan Todorov's "Living Alone Together

    Frances FergusonARTICLENew Literary History1996

    A Reply to Tzvetan Todorov’s “Living Alone Together” Frances Ferguson (bio) In “Living Alone Together,” Tzvetan Todorov presents a powerful description of the notion of “sociality” and uses it as a vantage point from which to criticize the limitations of the influential Kojèvian account of Hegel and his political philosophy of recognition. The essence of his view, as I understand it, is that Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Hegel announce the importance…

  • D.H. Lawrence: Language and being

    Frances FergusonARTICLEHistory of European Ideas1995

  • Canons, Poetics, and Social Value: Jeremy Bentham and How To Do Things with People

    Frances FergusonARTICLEModern Language Notes1995

    MLN - Volume 110, Number 5, December 1995 (French Issue)