Professor Helen Small: List of publications

This essay takes a historical approach to a current problem: how to read and respond to the argumentative practices of the moral and political controversialist in a context where it is vividly clear that some of the norms that frame and regulate “free speech” are contested by the controversialist. Thanks to Amanda Anderson and others, we have rich critical vocabularies for describing the complex ethos of modern liberalism and its norms of public argument as they developed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Controversialism, I suggest, presents a difficult challenge to liberal expectations of free speech. The moral controversialist may be antinormative in the sense that s/he is consciously rule-breaking but not rule-denying; s/he may also be antinormative in a deeper sense, denying the value of norms others consider settled. The impulse in the more aggressively antinormative case is sometimes merely contrarian; it may reflect alternative values; in the most problematic cases it emanates from denial of the existence of norms. By way of probing the relationship between normative and antinormative thinking about free speech, this essay returns to one of the most notorious literary and political controversialists of the nineteenth century. I argue that Thomas Carlyle’s deliberate offences against progressive sentiment in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849), and John Stuart Mill’s robust response, provide a helpful historical basis from which to consider similar challenges today to normative views of public argument and styles of expression.

In The Value of the Humanities prize-winning critic Helen Small assesses the value of the Humanities, eloquently examining five historical arguments in defence of the Humanities.

<p>‘I dispense with style’, M. Blandois/Rigaud tells Abel Flintwinch, with a Gallic wave of the hand (<em>LD</em>, i, 30, 345). He does and does not mean it. The lack of any stylistic attractions, any marks of fashion or elegance, about the Clennam house is irrelevant to Blandois’s purposes there, and no obstacle to pressing an entry; he is, at the same time and in his own person, an excrescence of style – a florid incursion of melodramatic mannerism into the mix of styles that constitutes and troubles Dickensian realism – one that must ultimately be <em>‘squashed’</em> (to borrow Garrett Stewart’s apposite verb) to permit a harmonious narrative conclusion for <em>Little Dorrit</em>.</p> <p>Critics standardly observe that Dickensian stylistic excess has a companion principle, a kind of counterweight in restraint or adherence to ‘limits’. It is a less obvious proposition that there might be, beyond this tension or contest between the unleashing and the control of expressive energy, and outside the specific acts of repression required for Dickens’s novels to conclude, any effort towards ‘plain style’. Applied across the whole career, the proposal would not (to invoke one of Dickens’s favoured objects of humour) have legs. But the first part of this essay tests the claim that, in so far as he had a worked-out theory of style (he had clear principles and gave consistent advice to others, but never spelled out a complete ‘theory’), he afforded a high place to Hazlitt’s definition of ‘plain style’. The virtues expressed in the idea of ‘plain style’ were at the heart of his sense of how good writing is to be distinguished from bad, and in many aspects of his writing he both abided by them himself and encouraged (or directed) others to do so.</p>