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" Pierre and the Non-Transparences of Figuration" argues that many critical readings of Herman Melville's 1852 novel depend on a non-necessary subordination of Pierre 's extravagant style to questions of characterology and plot to which the text seems at best ancillary and nonconventionally attached. My essay suggests that characterological volatility or depletion might more profitably be understood in terms of Melville's own movement away from imagining characters as mimetic instantiations of persons, and toward an account of aesthetic personhood resonant with recent psychoanalytic and queer-theoretical investigations of ontology itself as a particularly aesthetic phenomenon and predicament.

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What are the implications of patience's prominence in the final paragraphs of both Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady? How do these patiences differ from each other, and from patience as more ordinarily considered? Such questions provide the frame for a more sustained engagement with patience, as deployed in The Golden Bowl. Patience, in the hands of Maggie Verver and the Prince, becomes luridly preferable to what it otherwise seems to defer; James's treatment of patience, I argue, posits this mode of temporality as inextricable from understandings of knowledge, authority, and (most plangent in The Golden Bowl) from love.