ABSTRACT
From the perspective of this essay, performative writing’s most important con tribution to the history of critical and novelistic objectivities is its elaboration of se mantic temporality. Whereas both objective criticism and its most fully realized incarnation, New Criticism, insist on spatializing the literary object through metaphors of modelling, unities, and parts and wholes, performative writing refuses to treat spatializing metaphors as if they are literal and insists instead that reading/writing/understanding occurs in time, as part of the dynamic of loss, recov ery, and loss that is also the drama of embodiment. Most performative writing ac knowledges the appeal of spatialization, but it casts the spatializing gesture as a temporary interruption, or as a formal impediment capable of halting the remorseless process of flux only momentarily. For Sedgwick, the appeal of spatiality is epito mized by a lyric poem’s enjambment, the poetic device that drapes meaning across a broken line; for Phelan, writing about the film Silver lake Life: The View from Here, spatiality is the still photograph, and its affect comes from the “resistance to releas ing the moment into the past without securing its return” (157).
