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Gustavus Stadler. Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840-1890. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 296 pp. $70.50 (hardcover) $23.50 (paper).
"I have nothing to declare but my genius." If there is a definitive utterance about genius, American style, this may well be it, allegedly spoken by the Irishman Oscar Wilde to a bewildered U.S. customs officer on the verge of his celebrated junket of 1882. Whether or not Wilde in fact made the statement, it is shockingly cheeky, on par with Gertrude Stein's frequent self-application of this word that one should never self-apply. With little to his credit at this point other than his own celebrity-the tour promoted his caricature in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience-Wilde might well have said, I have nothing to show for my genius. Perhaps, then, what his sentence really means is that Wilde crosses the border with nothing save his talent for publicity. Unlike wizards of the public sphere, whose originality is adduced by more solid achievements, genius consists here solely in publicizing the performance of its otherness ex nihilo. What the sentence gets at is the core concern of Gustavus Stadler's intelligent and wide-ranging book: the queerness of the rhetoric of exceptional "genius" when it is presented in bodily form and the hidden political work of this cultural address. In effect, the book tells a secret origin of the modern practice of spokespersonship, in which the public intellectual becomes, as Dick Pels has well observed, both a professional stranger and mass-mediated show person.
Today, we might find a word like celebrity more familiar than genius in this connection. When Time recently numbered the representative geniuses of our age, it counted Einstein, Marie Curie, Picasso, Bill Gates, Yo-Yo Ma, and Tiger Woods, not Chaplin, Marilyn, Elvis, Prince, or Paris Hilton. But, according to Stadler, by ignoring the more spectacular and sensational side of genius, we obscure the very political legacy of "the discourse [as it furthered] an increasing demand for writers and other cultural practitioners to perform emotional work for a citizenry made of cultural consumers" (xv). To this end, his book is not overly interested in the figures many would conventionally categorize as the representative (male) geniuses of the nineteenth century-the ex nihilo eggheads,...