Chasing David Copperfield’s Memory of a Stained Glass Window: Or, Meditations on the Postsecular and Postcritical

Abstract

On meeting Agnes Wickfield, David Copperfield – the eponymous hero of Dickens’s beloved autobiographical novel – reflects, “I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I had seen a stained glass window in a church. Nor do I recollect its subject. But I know that when I saw her turn round . . . I thought of that window; and I associated something of its tranquil brightness with Agnes Wickfield ever afterward” (194). From one perspective, this moment seems a testament to David’s unreliable powers of observation, but there is more to his comparison than simply that. Indeed, we open with this passage from David Copperfield because we – scholars of nineteenthcentury British literature – found David’s recollection here a particularly resonant convergence of religion, criticism, and the postcritical that it is the purpose of the essays collected in this special issue to explore. Trying to describe Agnes, David invokes, of all things, a stained glass window he once saw in a church, but he says nothing concrete, material, or substantial about it: its location, purpose, colors, dimensions, position, artist, era, and even subject matter are lost. In other words, everything that might form the subject of a critique, history, or theory of the window is missing. Nevertheless, David is convinced that the feeling imparted by the church window suffices in comprehending the person of Agnes. And he’s right, of course. It turns out that to conceive Agnes, to see her in our mind’s eye and to understand her value and meaning, we don’t need an exhaustive cataloging of the definite attributes of a church’s stained glass window. David’s approach to conveying to his reader what Agnes means to him struck us as analogous to approaches encouraged by postcriticism. Motivating this burgeoning field, more or less, is a persistent question: if, as Helen Small has suggested, the raison d’etre of the humanities is the “study of the meaning-making practices of the culture,” is it a given in literary studies that critique is necessarily the best mode for carrying out this study (4)? Do the “moves” and engrained practices of critique best reveal how a text makes its meanings?