Rewriting the Flats: Genre and Infrastructural Time in Constance Fenimore Woolson's “Round by Propeller” and “St. Clair Flats”
Abstract
This article compares Constance Fenimore Woolson's two representations of the St. Clair Flats in “Round by Propeller” and “St. Clair Flats” to examine how literary forms organize the temporal visibility of infrastructural change. Rather than treating the canal solely as a symbol of industrial modernity or reading landscape change as the sole consequence of infrastructural development, this study uses comparative close reading to identify how the temporal status of infrastructure is constructed differently in the two genre forms. The analysis yields three configurations: Anticipated Infrastructure, where the straight canal presents itself as a future project promising to reduce detours and the burden of navigational attention; Realized Infrastructure through Retrospective Recognition, where the narrator's return in 1870 transforms the anticipated project into a retrospectively recognized change; and Obstructed Infrastructure, where the disruption of the canal in “Round by Propeller” forces the ship back to the old channel and expands narrative attention to the space traversed. The comparison demonstrates that infrastructural failure is not simply a theme: obstruction changes the route, and this change in route reorganizes narrative attention. This article uses infrastructural perceptibility as an umbrella concept and the temporal legibility of infrastructural change as its analytical mechanism. Read comparatively, the two texts demonstrate that literary forms shape infrastructural perceptibility by organizing how infrastructural change becomes legible through futurity, retrospective recognition, and breakdown. This contribution expands Woolson studies and literary infrastructure studies without generalizing genre distinctions beyond the use of both forms in Woolson's work.
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References
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