The Long Eighteenth

Switching to Beta

2006-12-21T14:03:00.000-05:00

Hello, all. Another technical note:

I am in the process of switching the blog over to the Beta version. I do not like Beta, as it requires us to create Google accounts, which I think is not good. Part of me would rather just switch this whole caboodle over to Wordpress.com, which I have done (and will make to look pretty, I promise) here. If we decide to move there, this blog will still be up, at least as an archive for the old comments.

The one drawback of Wordpress is that it will not accept Haloscan. I like their comment-function better than Haloscan, and it is spam-regulated. We can still link to the old discussions here, and I will try to import recent comments and those from the Parker discussion, to keep it live.

The decision we need to make as a community is between the following options:

1. Do we want to stay on Blogger and make everyone get Google accounts to transfer to Beta?
2. Do we want to move to Wordpress, where everyone will still have to create new accounts, but they won't mess with your email?

UPDATE: I have decided, we are not all going to get Google accounts and switch to Beta. It is too much of a hassle. We are all going to Wordpress and creating accounts there. Once you have a Wordpress account, email me and let me know what email address you used and I will invite you to join the Long Eighteenth.

WHY DO I LIKE IT BETTER? Just look. The Collaborative Readings information is in an obvious bar across the header, and it has embedded Category links in the sidebar, too. You can navigate easily from post to post and the front page is always quickly accessible. If I'm not mistaken, the pages even load faster, which is a big deal for us dinosaurs still on dial-up.

Once you join, I'll set you all to "administrators" so you can edit comments (like if, for example, you see you've made a typo), check the blog stats yourself (so it's not all a mystery in my hands how many hits we get) and enjoy all the WP extras. I think this will be far better than the patched-together nature of our Blogspot blog.

Thanks for voting!

2006-12-19T13:19:00.000-05:00

I emerge briefly from the lightless pit of exam grading to thank any of you who may have voted for me for the MLA Delegate Assembly. I will be representing the graduate students of New York State from 2007-2010. May I not actually be a graduate student that long!

As we've mentioned in comments, this blog may be taking an unplanned mini-hiatus while we all do some deep-breathing exercises. I will probably need some advice about evaluating what are some truly baffling exam results. I only gave the exam, you'll remember, because I was concerned that all the opportunities for getting a grade in my class were based on extremely rigorous at-home and in-class writing, so I thought I'd make at least half of the exam easy, non-analytical questions one can actually study for.

As is par for my class, the students who were already doing well (about a third) studied very hard and got high A's, even a few perfect scores. The students who were not doing so great at the analytical exercises did not study at all (or freaked out, or something) and failed the exam mightily, misidentifying even the protagonists of the three novels we read, naming Samuel Johnson as "A Victorian poet," and answering the gimme question "Who is your favorite writer we read this semester and why?" with "William Burroughs" and no explanation. (Needless to say, we did not study William Burroughs in Brit Lit Survey.) I know my students probably know the answers to these questions—they're all pretty obvious and I have made sure in other ways that they read the material—so I'm guessing it's some kind of intense exam-phobia.

I can't ignore the final results; obviously many of my students deserve to have their grade raised by their excellent performance. But I also feel terrible dropping some of what are already barely-passing grades because of totally botched exams. Sure, these results are probably an effect of poor reading skills, and it is a reading class, so those skills are being tested, but testing someone on how well they understand my questions, as a text, is less important than whether they understand the literature itself.

So this is why I've been away from the blog. Thinking about it makes me want to bang my head against the wall, and though I would rather be thinking about interesting C18 scholarship, my head is otherwise occupied.

I am hoping Parker is able to join the conversation once the CUNY semester is out, which is this week.

Is anyone else coming to MLA? Should we have lunch one day?

The Triumph of Grading Hell?

2006-12-17T12:46:00.000-05:00

Is the discussion of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics over, or have we just unofficially adjourned until final grades for the fall semester are done? The latter, I hope!

Johnson and Fideism

2006-12-12T18:33:00.000-05:00

Although the previous chapter was titled, “The Fideist Reaction,” there were several earlier hints of a “Protestant reaction” extending forward into the nineteenth century. That complete history does not appear in this chapter, as Parker analyzes Samuel Johnson’s works as part of the initial return of fideist art. Although the concept of a divided Samuel Johnson is not new, Parker provides us with new terms for that split in naming the two halves of Johnson’s literary nature—one part is Humanist curiosity about the world (and literature in particular), and one part is fideist skepticism about the value of earthly activities (literature among all others). This latter impulse is seen most strongly in The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas, in which diverse human activity leads to the same sense of futility and exhaustion (with Solomon the representative, non-classical figure of spiritual weariness). This chapter really should be read with the previous chapter for full appreciation of the fideist motifs that Parker identifies in Johnson’s work. Among other motifs, Johnson’s work emphasizes futility, meditation, and stasis. This fideist element extended to Johnson’s perception of his own activities; his literary output stimulated and amused him, but could achieve for him no higher value: “For Johnson poetry (and every art) is a diversion, a toy…and a bauble” (238). Likewise, for Johnson private devotions, though a necessary and sober duty, could provide no sense of certainty, no knowledge of divine intentions. Parker argues that Johnson’s relationship to God, and hence to God’s works, is fideist in a specific and limited: “the form of imagination in which the divine is understood is infinitely remote from sensation, analogy, and all discursive knowledge” (231 n. 3). To seek, or rather linger patiently, is pious, but to expect certainty outside of the promises of the Bible is foolish.

This image of a fideist and un-analogical Johnson affirms the thesis of the book, which is that analogical representations of God became impossible after the Augustans had done their work. The contrast between Johnson in this chapter and the account of Edward Young in the previous chapter is meant to be instructive: one incorporates modes of inquiry despite pessimism about its relevance, and the other is meditative to the point of total absence/departure. The other part of this argument is that Johnson, by systematically (dialectically?) opposing his Humanist influences to his fideist beliefs, was in fact two—creating and sustaining a paradox, to the point that “Johnson was not a man of his time” (248).

This last assertion should be closely pondered for its historical implications. If Johnson combines all of these Augustan, Humanist and fideist influences, yet is not of his time, then how does he come to appear at the end of this book? It seems strange to conclude a historically situated reading with this kind of flourish, which shows respect for Johnson as a thinker and writer but leaves us in an odd place. We are told that “Johnson solved the problem that divided the literary culture of his day”—that is, the problem of reinstating religious expression in art—“by dividing himself” (249). The last time we saw such a division was in the account of Abraham Cowley, of whom it was said “He was one of the first to feel the failure of analogy. …one of the first to reckon with the problem of a necessary revision of consciousness” but also one who “left behind an indecipherable legacy” (78-9). If Johnson represents a solution to the problems created by the Augustans, where should we look for a continuation of that solution? If he is not of his time, what is his relevance? To put it another way, is Johnson a transitional figure like Cowley, a representative figure like Pope, or a revolutionary figure like Butler? This account seems in some ways to lean towards a transitional definition: Johnson looks back to Humanist authors “now obscure” and presides over the revival of “fideist art,” albeit without being able to fully occupy the fideist mode in the manner of Edward Young. I find myself wondering what might be the relationship of this final figure to subsequent fideism in Parker’s account.

Finally, I’d like to add on to Kirsten Wilcox’s final question in the previous post by asking frankly what our own assessment might be of the relative readability of Night Thoughts and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Wilcox asks whether Johnson and Young are “united in their turn against the Augustan empirical project”—if they are/if they are not, how might readability (or familiarity—the degree to which either is read these days) affect our ability to judge the similarity or difference of the impulses behind the two poems? And what then would be the relevance of such a comparison?

The Fideist Reaction

2006-12-12T01:25:00.000-05:00

Like Bill Levine, I come to “my” chapter late and with less of a first-hand engagement with the rest of Parker’s book than I would like. That said, I’ve been finding the conversation deeply absorbing. This is a book that I will be coming back to, and I’m grateful to this blog for getting me engaged with it at a point in the semester when the demands of teaching exert a relentless pull.

Parker concludes the previous chapter (“Four Poles of the Christian Imagination”) with the recognition that the model he uses to describe the domain of pre-Augustan Christian poetry is not “a kind of simplistic nomenclature to round off the ragged edges and complexities of Christian poetics.” As Carrie pointed out in her post, these categories may be more supple and permeable than the model suggests, when applied to individual works and writers. Nevertheless, “fideism” emerges in the next chapter (“The Fideist Reaction”) as the inevitable solution to “acute” crisis in “the Christian poetic imagination.” The abandonment of analogism and the rise of empiricism, Parker argues, limits the religiously expressive power of poetry up to the 1740s. This transitional late-Augustan poetry (my term, not Parker’s) can range anywhere from the “dismally pedestrian” (Pope’s versions of the Psalms), to the “unassuming, pious, and prosaic” (Watts’ hymns), and the “dubious and contrived” (Hill’s nature poetry).

I wondered about this assertion of “the Christian poetic imagination” and the claim that “the period from 1670 to 1740 did not produce one really important Christian poem aside from hymns” (199). There seems to be a narrowing here of what counts as “poetic imagination.” It’s my impression that devotional poetry proliferates during this period (particularly by women writers), along with hymns (over 500 by Watts alone, as Parker notes). Might this sheer quantity (along with the kind of repetition and imitation it entails) suggest that “the Christian poetic imagination” in the period may have turned away from certain kinds of poetic virtuousity yet still be expressing itself in poetic social practices that sneak under the radar of close readings of aesthetically significant poems? But that’s me beating the new historicist drum, and thinking about the book I would write rather than responding the book Parker wrote.

For Parker, Matthew Prior’s Alma marks the transition to something new: Augustan in “tone and design” it nonetheless “repudiates a good deal of Augustan thinking.” Parker identifies that repudiation with his distinction between “Davidic” and “Solomonic” forms of poetic and religious imagination. The Psalms bear “a naturalistic plenitude like that of a good deal of Baroque English poetry.” After 1700, however, poets were drawn away from the Davidic Psalms to a different poetic vision, that of Ecclesiastes and Job, “a wisdom…based on…the testing in experience of the objects of creation and finding them unequal to man’s spiritual thirst” (218). This “Solomonic” way of viewing the relationship between humans and God was particularly amenable to the fideists who identified “neither image nor analogy, neither reason nor perception, in the endless journey to a God who remains distant and unknowable, except as an object of promise and hope” (215).

The chapter ends with a reading of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, which Parker describes as “the supreme…emptying out of the Augustan field of natural objects, and also of the tensions inherent in the heroic couplet…done on behalf of a kind of morbid and protracted wisdom literature, the most peculiar in English” (221). One of the things I particularly enjoyed about Parker’s discussion of Night Thoughts was his effort, as in conveying the novelty of the Augustans, to get across just how new and unusual the poetry he’s writing about was to its contemporary audience. The reading of Night Thoughts is riddled with pithy assessments that simultaneously repel and entice—perverse book-jacket blurbs: “a work…of both incomprehensible novelty and proverbial truth,” “Night Thoughts in turn mesmerizes, irritates and stultifies,” “mixture of witty apothegm and ponderous meditation,” “the supreme dalliance in the field of fideist meditation.” I too have been mesmerized and irritated by Night Thoughts–and perplexed by its invisibility. Fairer and Gerrard did not include it in the Blackwell anthology Eighteenth-Century Poetry (as far as I know the only eighteenth-century poetry-only anthology in print at the moment), and the widely taught Longman anthology of restoration and eighteenth-century literature only includes the first third of Night the First.

Although Parker uses Young’s poem to fully flesh out what “the fideist reaction” is and how it appealed to contemporary audiences, it is here that I begin to wonder if a concept that achieves its supreme expression in such a bewildering poem is really a concept that can usefully unite the range of poetry that Young applies it to. Parker repeatedly speaks of Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes as the “companion piece” to Night Thoughts, yet while both poems present a similar theology of God’s inaccessibility and the crucial leap of faith, these themes play out very differently in the two poems. Young’s poem repeatedly reaches for God over a series of nights in a state framed by “sleep and languorous dream” (as Parker puts it) and rings every possible change on that search. In Johnson’s Vanity the possibility of seeking God (as a futile but perhaps psychologically useful last resort) is raised only at the end of a poem that for the most part focuses on thick descriptions of earthly life. Are these two writers united in their turn against the Augustan empirical project—or are they turning that project in new directions (in Young’s case, turning Thomson’s “anxious eye” inward to watch and learn from the fluctuations of the soul)?

Four poles of the Christian imagination

2006-12-10T19:22:00.000-05:00

The placement of this chapter immediately struck me as curious--we don't hear about the "perennial Christian tradition" until Ch. 5 (pg. 174). BP offers the following explanation: "With the examples of Butler, Cowley, Pope and Thomson already fleshed out, it will be easier to summarize the conflicts between Augustan and Baroque imagination" (175). It's interesting to see him go back to the material that the Augustans were responding to, and then to move on to fideism in post-Augustan writers.

BP remarks early in this chapter that the Augustan "is the strand which has formed in different ways the prejudices and habits of thought for the class of enlightened elites which encompasses both capitalists and radical intellectuals" (175). I would propose this remark as something we might discuss further in the comments below. I would have thought, for example, that dissent and fideism were more fruitful philosophical veins for some radical thinkers--or even for capitalism in very traditional accounts of the Protestant work ethic via Weber.

BP presents four modes: the logist (which imagines "a faith perfected by knowledge . . . a faith presenting a distinct object to the intellect"); the analogical ("rather than verbal formulation and equivalence, it seeks in the image of the creature an intelligible or imaginative trace of God"); the mystical ("it attempts a severe discipline to find the unmeditated person of God") and the fideist (it "exists whenever God is perceived as an absence").

The delineation of these modes gives scholars of Christian writing a number of effective tools, allowing for precise descriptions of how a Christian author understands and represents God, and how a Christian author might represent or attain knowledge. Like any delineation, however, the boundaries between "modes" might be investigated. In fact, BP allows for some overlap between the modes within individual works, within the Bible as a whole, and within the careers of individual authors. He notes "the special relations of the two symbolic and the two ontological modes" as well. I would have liked to see more commentary on how some authors combine multiple modes and whether these modes can also be held as distinct categories of Christian symbolism and ontology.

For example, Bunyan is placed as a fideist writer on the chart of 194-5. This makes sense, for Bunyan does indeed seem to be alone in a world vacated by God, and often terrified of having been abandoned by God. As well, he works within classic genres of fideism--the confessional biography and the allegorical spiritual journey narratives. I am wondering, however, whether there is an element of the logist in Bunyan's writing which contradicts the fideist elements. Bunyan, of course, is a very different logist from, say, Eleanor Davies, but he does seem interested in verbal puzzles and in the revealing power of the Book. After all, there is an "Interpreter" figure in The Pilgrim's Progress--and Scripture and Biblical text seems to take on an extremely active role in Grace Abounding as well. And does not the great writer of allegory see God in the "creature" as well? Is there no capacity in Bunyan for the experience of a "figure-making God?" [Donne's words, quite by BP].

My final impression of the "four poles" is that each "pole" is a fruitful interpretative tool to approach Christian writers--but that individual Christian writers might have more of a mixture of each mode than BP allows here.

I would be interested in talking about the emphasis in fideist Christian cultures of "fellowship" or even congregational unity. After reading BP's account of fideism, I wonder if the Lutheran and anabaptist and/or independent emphasis on fellowship is not a direct response to the hollow feeling of an absent God (the second half of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress might exhibit this kind of fellowship, as Christiana is accompanied by a vast company of fellow believers.)

On a separate but related note re. the baroque and shifts of cultural priorities, think of Alex Ross's remarks in The New Yorker about the resurgence of interest in Handel (of course, some of us never left him). Ross writes: "it’s a bit of a mystery why Handel has become so crucial for early-twenty-first-century listeners. The prior century made a cult of Bach, whose music takes the form of an endless contrapuntal quest. Perhaps, in an age of information overload and ambient fear, we have more need for Handel’s gentler, steadier art." Of course Ross also adds that Handel grants us not only gentleness and steadiness but also "high-class melodrama and psychological theater."

Here's the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/060508crmu_music

I enjoyed this chapter a great deal.

Thomson and the Problems of the "Literal"

2006-12-08T04:08:00.000-05:00

Excuse the belatedness of this post, as I’m still returning to normalcy after finishing up my last classes yesterday. I also wish that my comments could be better informed by a careful study of Parker’s entire work, but at the very least I’ll indirectly address some of the engaging blogging on the earlier chapters.

The highlight of this chapter is a shrewd reading of Thomson’s Summer as the most daunting experiment in the expansion of Augustan “literalism,” including a widened range of subject matter and an associative and accretive (or perhaps one could substitute “metonymic”) basis for the juxtaposition of its positivistic scenes. Parker applies his thesis quite deliberately to Summer, the one book of Thomson’s poem that is most free of moralistic, religious, or generically-encoded overtones and can thus serve as a test case for the limits of a purely empirical poetics. The metaphysical and analogical traces in the book of nature have been emptied out, along with the significations of classical literary tradition. Milton, whose influence is also challenged, is said to be competing with Newton for priority in Thomson’s representations of the summer sun, a poetic source of both “a neutral, mechanistic view and a traditional dramatic one” that emphasizes the fallen nature of the heterocosm. Thomson has already benefited from the satirical assaults on the Baroque aesthetic and its theological residue; thus the ground is cleared for what is by far the most naturalistic mode of poetic representation at this point in history and arguably the forerunner of modern conceptions of nature poetry--a bold move to make at this point after the dominance of Wordsworth—whom I’ll return to later—in this dimension of lit history, and the related dominance of Romantic aesthetics in defining modern critical formations of nature poetry.

At the same time, the application of the book’s larger thesis to Thomson strikes me as a somewhat insular, not only in eliding new historicism, as others have remarked, but also in the way that it engages with the critical practices one might associate with Earl Wasserman, an interweaving of close reading with what was then called the history of ideas, the way a single work is a synecdoche for a governing epistemological formation. Granted, we now recognize elements of continuity and change in formations consisting of works that overlap with and distance themselves from earlier norms. Perhaps, as Marshall Brown put it in Preromanticism, we may also sense that a such works are “on their way” to an emergent formation, remaining in a halfway house between the neoclassical and the Romantic, while still cohering as a viable epistemological construct with its own identity.

In response to earlier blog discussion, this chapter leaves me with no doubt that scientific and intellectual developments had to precede the literary innovation. For instance, one of Parker’s most incisive remark on the impossibility of a Lockeian poetry of pure sensation (160) enters his discussion as part of an elaborate concession to the various forms of abstraction inherent in the nature of language and in Thomson’s moralizing or other generalizing tendencies that may obscure the visual power, immediacy, and “physical verisimilitude” of the poetry. As Parker admits, he’s “running counter” to the major critics on Thomson who have focused on his “moral generalization, classical abstraction, and Christian theodicy” when he asserts that these are the “least important and the least representative qualities in Thomson” (159) and chooses to emphasize the poet’s extensive array of “neutral description” as his most genuinely innovative development. It may be of value to bracket this quality of Thomson, but Parker’s choice foregrounds the problems of selection, exclusion, prioritization, and driving home an overarching thesis in any literary history that attempts to define a “period.” When Wordsworth enters the discussion in rather flat ways that suggest a “resymbolization” and moral elevation of the literally descriptive poetry he had read in his youth but refused to acknowledge in his 1798 Preface, he and the other Romantics are reduced to the equivalent of contrasting boundary-markers; nor do we need to trot out Geoffrey Hartman to prove that Wordsworth and the other Romantics did not simply fall back on “intervening abstractions” to “color and direct” what would otherwise be the more purely empirical “concentrated description” of Pope and Thomson. Even given the concession above, what happens to the problem of poetic diction or the ways that nature turns into an ontology of poetic form and composition? It was Donald Davie who said that one finds Miltonic diction in Thomson, not Milton.

It’s a testimony to the book’s power and erudition that the Thomson chapter left me with several questions I feel rather uneasy in answering without further investigation. One is whether there really is such a thing as “purely literal” poetry. Can the literary historian clear an empirical space untarnished by metaphysical presence between the Baroque and the Romantic? It would also be a curious exercise—perhaps I’ll suggest it to a theoretically inclined grad student--to reflect on the elements of Bate’s Burden of the Past that trickle down into both Harold Bloom and Parker, and the polarized ways that they see poetic influence and originality panning out.

While Parker abundantly provides Arnoldian touchstones that contrast analogical Renaissance depictions of nature with the empirical literalism of Thomson’s, I find it hard to abstract even a few lines from any book of The Seasons that are not already infiltrated by some anterior form of discourse that secures moralistic, classical, secularized-theodical holism, or, alternatively, inductive-scientific closure of the sort that confers systematic meaning upon any individualized natural object as part of a metonymic chain of signifiers. Admittedly, the system of signification has drastically altered by the c18, as the taxonomic plenitude suggested by, for instance, Thomson’s “naturalistic” catalog of morning birds and their calls proceeds by a kind of overdetermined inductive process to signify the providential abundance of the world; it “shows” rather than “tells” as a more traditional hymn would do via openly allegorical “correspondence,” and it’s underwritten more by scientific certainty than by the implied or openly declared presence of a god. Indeed, as Parker clearly argues, the abundance of description threatens to overwhelm the elements of moral closure, but this observation may belong more to the reception aesthetic of the poem (the article on Thomson’s uses of contradiction that John Barrell and Harriet Guest contributed to the New Eighteenth Century collection, e.g.) than a historically-sensitive reconstruction of Thomson’s plan or poetic tendencies. As much as I appreciate Parker’s identification of “downward metaphors of modern positivism” (172) in The Seasons that suggest the affinities between humanity and a natural world denuded of analogical traces, I would ask whether the inductive leaps of science and empirical philosophy serve as the a posteriori God-term in this poetry of Newtonian discovery. Does a new, secularized sign-system (nature as a mechanistic process, e.g.) ever completely supplant its metaphysical predecessor or does it still depend on rewriting or re-allegorizing a continuous cultural heritage preserved in classical and Judeo-Christian texts, albeit approached “scientifically”?

One segment of Parker’s nuanced reading raised doubts about the “literal” that he made generous concessions to without quite establishing or modifying his main argument. Thomson depended on anthropological writings and natural histories in order to envision both edenic and chaotic scenes of life in Africa (165-67), and I agree that he deserves credit for his “studied prospect of minute detail,” even if this prospect relies on literary mediation and its allusive, mostly Miltonic bedrock, as well as elements of fantasy that supplement his factual sources. Yet even if we grant such descriptions the same “literal” status as the images of flora and fauna that his reputedly nearsighted vision could directly detect, the extensive descriptions of African nature indirectly underwrite a teleology of Whiggish progress, latch georgic cultivation (a mode that Parker had earlier discounted as a means of organizing sight and space in Summer [159]), onto the “Progressive Truth” of scientific inquiry, and justify imperial domination.

Finally, to quibble with one example from what I generally find to be his illuminating analogies to the history of painting at this time: How can West’s Death of Wolfe be said to treat its subject in a way that “yields no figurative depth” (156) when there’s an obvious attempt to parallel this hero of secular, modern imperial history with those of the past? It’s not necessary to compare Wolfe with Jesus to see that it’s more than a “merely structural” pose that is indebted to a “mechanical” tradition of history painting that had been emptied of its analogical or typological force. One problem here is that “structural” cannot be equated with “literal”; another is that the moral dimension of this scene has to come from somewhere: is it only “modern” British history or is some level of analogy with classical and biblical culture inevitable, however much their “absence” is now supplanted by the presence of the present. And does even the most “mechanical” of traditions (which gives short shrift to West’s innovations) carry with it some overtones of prior figurations; let’s call it intertextuality if we don’t like the evaluative assumptions inherent in the word “depth.”

Alex Seltzer on "Scientific Verse" up to about 1730

2006-12-07T00:42:00.000-05:00

Alex Seltzer has sent in a guest post in response to Parker's Chapter 4, which is as follows:

In chapter 4 on "Thomson and the invention of the literal," Parker discusses the new objects of poetry: "By 1720 poetry was no longer a basically religious or even courtly manner. It was for the first time the art of everything. It was the vehicle of the fully literal, the realization of the physical and detached nature of things." [p. 137] He then cited Margaret Doody: "Nothing is so common, so bizarre, so unclean -or so grand -that it can't be appreciated and consumed by the poetic process." Doody, The Daring Muse, p. 9].

I have been delving into the "scientific verse" of poets such as Blackmore (Creation), Prior (Solomon), Baker (Universe), Collins (Nature Display'd), Brooke (Universal Beauty). To these I add Thomson's Season's which impresses me as being on a much higher plane and less concerned with the argument by design which was the common theme. My goal has been to extract "arguments by design" based strictly on biological models. The purpose is to draw a parallel between the imagery of these poets and the illustrations of the contemporary naturalist, Mark Catesby. His illustrations of new world flora and fauna have been labeled as the "graphic equivalent of poems." (David Wilson, In the Presence of Nature, 1978, p. 147).

Turning to the natural theological verse of the above poets, we find the bedrock of such poetry consists of example after example of "proofs" of the divine creator's existence as reflected in "the book of nature." More often than not, the poet points out the obvious and conveys it in bombastic terminology. To cite one of my favorite examples, here is Brooke on the architectural skills of bees (a pet topic of these poets) from his Universal Beauty:

Swift for the tasks the ready builders part,
Each band assigned to each peculiar art;
A troop of chymists scout the neighboring field,
While servile tribes the cull'd materials wield,
With tempering feet the labored cement tread,
And ductile now its waxen foliage spread.
The geometricians judge the deep design,
Direct the compass, and extend the line;
The sum their numbers provident of space,
And suit each edifice with answering grace.
Now first appears the rough proportion'd frame,
Rough in draught, but perfect in the scheme;
When lo! Each little Archimedes nigh,
Mates every angle with judicious eye;
Adjusts the center cones with skill profound
And forms the curious hexagon around.
[book 6, lines 191-206]

To repeat, was such poetry consumed, if not by a broad public, then by an influential elite? Are these just faint echoes of John Ray's Wisdom of God? or powerful amplifications that brought "the argument by design" into the mainstream? The very fact that poets were tackling a variety of new subjects suggests that the audience was broadening but that is supposition on my part.

Secondly, is it fair to regard this now as "bad poetry?" Blackmore's Creation was defended by Johnson (Lives of the Poets) but he condemned Prior's Solomon as tedious. I don't know about the others. (Swift's famous ditty about flea's hosting smaller parasites may have been directed towards Baker). I find much of this poetry (to my delight) comparable to the howlers of William McGonagal's Victorian-era "poetic gems" ("Greenland's Icy Mountains"), but he had the defense of being uneducated, whereas Collins' "Little Archimedes" screams that he had a classical education. In fact, there seems to be a conspicuous "show-off" element, each poet trying to out-do the next, much as Swift's "Flea" suggests. Was this sort of poetry exceptionally bad, or merely run-of-the-mill bad? Maybe such a discussion is irrelevant in an academic context?

I've found little on these biologically-oriented poems other than Bonamy Dobree's English Literature in the Early 18th Century. Suggestions on further reading are welcome -both on the poems and the broader context. (Perhaps other pre-1730 poems could be included?)

Sincerely, Alex Seltzer (art historian unfamiliar with poetry) Philadelphia

Parker Chapter Three: "Pope and Mature Augustanism": Some Reflections

2006-12-06T16:30:00.000-05:00

Reading Parker's chapter on Pope was both difficult and interesting for me. Difficult because I have not done much work in the beginning of the century for years now, and interesting because the Augustan poets created my early love affair with the eighteenth century. The first class I took for my masters degree, nearly 10 years ago at the tender age of 21, straight out of my bachelors program, was Augustan Satire, Parody, and Burlesque. The course followed the same rough outline that Parker takes in his book: we began with Butler's Hudibras and continued on with Swift's scatalogical poetry, which fascinated and mystified me, and moved on to Pope and Gay. As Dave wrote, there were numerous sections in Parker's book that pulled together a lot of things about the individual writers I had previously thought but not in an organized way. Parker's book is so dense and his analysis so layered that I have found it enormously difficult to be critical--I feel like my three year-old daughter must feel when she looks at the selection of princess dolls at the Disney store and all she can say is, "Wow." There were so many different ideas that really intrigued me that I am having a hard time picking just a few to discuss.

There are aspects of the chapter that are brilliant. Parker's analysis of the meaning of the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock is one such aspect. Rejecting previous interpretations of the sylphs and their role within the poem, Parker suggests rather that the sylphs have no real function in the poem, and that this is Pope's point in including them. They are not real; they do not exist. Parker writes, "The imagination alone can add them. They are beautiful traces of cultural memory. Their elaboration only enforces the strict realization of their metaphysical impossibility" (106). The non-existence of the sylphs works, according to Parker, to emphasize to the reader Belinda's "autonomy--and through Belinda the autonomy of the man or woman of sentiment. By collapsing the heavenly and the demonic spheres, the binarism of Renaissance spirituality becomes purely psychological" (106).

Another intriguing aspect of Parker' s argument in this chapter is his notion that Pope's inclusion of the sylphs helps make the satire in the poem seem gentler and thus "masks" the Hudibrastic elements of the poem: "The sylphs, the sphere of the angelic and the fatal, lack the real force and weight of the personified 'Discord' of Boileau, the 'Ignorance' of Butler, the 'Absurdity' of Hobbes, or Dryden's 'Dullness.' All these are substantial elements in the moral landscape of the Augustan world. Their role is to anatomize the vices of the vain and ignorant and to clear a space for the Lockeian sensus communis. Such a withering critique retains the normative power of traditional satire. In this difference lies the particular power and charm of Pope's poem. For the modern reader, Butler and Swift may appear to bludgeon mankind. Their satire is often violent, sometimes repellant. The Rape of the Lock, while performing the cultural work of Augustan satire--that is, clearing away the rubble of the past, and making a space for the imperturbable observer--does it with such grace and elan that it goes unnoticed" (107). In all, Parker's discussion of The Rape of the Lock and particularly of the role of the sylphs within the poem made me wish, as I think Carrie and Dave have also, that I had read this book before now.

What most intrigues me is Parker's larger point about the scope of the Augustan "project," if such it can be called, and the ways in which he suggests poetics dictates similar shifts in other fields. I am really interested in his notion that imaginative shifts create philosophical ones, rather than the other way around. There was one particular section that struck me in this regard: "Although the low Augustan, the Hudibrastic, has an obvious counterpart in the practice of Hogarth, and the higher in Gainsborough and Wilson, these connections point to an underlying departure from emblem and icon. Landscape and history painting invoke the classical as literal" (122). This passage encapsulates a primary point of Parker's third chapter: the classicism in Pope is transformed from analogical to literal through Pope's use of what Parker calls "the method of the empirical within poetry" (122). However, the passage also points to the broadness of Augustanism in the early 18th century and reinforces his previous hints about the connections between Augustan poetics and novelistic writing. These hints were tantalizing to me, almost in an agonizing way, because they were just hints--I wanted more in-depth discussion of the connections between Augustan poetics and the novel, though I recognize that such a discussion lies outside of Parker's purpose in this work.

There were so many of these types of hints that made me stop reading and just think for a while--one or two sentences in which, as I said above, random thoughts I'd had about the writers coalesced into more distinct shapes--and the more I try to write about them, the less satisfied I become with this post. So I will stop here and hope to continue the discussion in the comments area.

Chapter 2: the eclipse of analogy, and periodizations of the sign

2006-12-05T18:02:00.000-05:00

A few thoughts about ch. 2, which take off from my earlier post.

The more I read this book, the more strongly I'm reminded of the epistemic arguments of the Order of Things, and especially the periodizations of the sign offered in that book, as well as those influenced by Foucault's and Juri Lotman's historical semiotics. I'm thinking here of David Wellbery and Friedrich Kittler's work on the historicity of signification, though I don't expect others to follow me there.

I say this knowing full well that BP argues against epistemes in his introduction, but for me the most compelling part of his argument is the way in which he uses the large-scale paradigm-shifts in figuration as the basis for his Baroque-Augustan dividing line. This is one reason why I think that BP's work sits very nicely with Wellbery and Bender's work on "rhetoricality," and the massive implications of the shift from rhetorical to anti-rhetorical paradigms during the Enlightenment. This anti-analogy/anti-rhetorical shift encompasses many of the issues of prose style, history-writing, etc. that come up here in this chapter.

I'm also intrigued by the notion in the closing pages about this period's "reinvention of nature," and it does seem that BP is exactly right when he talks about the natural scenery of Pope's pastorals being more literal, more empirical, more temporalized somehow than the leafy scenes found in earlier versions of the pastoral. I'm not sure I want to read the Deus Absconditus into this as quickly as BP does, but it does mean that the presence of empirical science is being registered in very subtle ways: perhaps science lends to things an impervious shell of facticity that the Augustan observer need not delve into. But I do appreciate BP's idea that the "literalism" of the Augustans is not a blankness or absence, but a very specific set of approved relations to signification, with other forms of signification either interdicted or degraded almost beyond recognition.

DM

Transitional Augustan poetry, anyone?

2006-12-05T15:27:00.000-05:00

I promised I would pick up the slack on the "Transitional Augustan poetry" chapter, and have written and deleted several posts that attempted to address this chapter. All my attempts were very bad, so I have decided to keep this as short as possible and hope for comments.

I enjoyed this chapter very much, as it addresses Cowley, whose poetry I often find myself reading aloud in funny voices. In fact, I would say this was the chapter that most directly answered my own queasiness/fascination with the early Augustan. Much of the who/what/when/how of the Augustan shift is described in this chapter, but I admit I required seeing Parker elaborate in the Pope chapter that follows before I saw clearly where this was going.

I wonder if it is a failure of my imagination that I am more comfortable discussing authors who are self-consciously manipulating a dominant aesthetic than those who are caught between two ages, still holding onto the tail of one while they grasp out toward the head of the next. I think Parker does this well, but I did not nod furiously along as I read it (as I did when I came to Pope), but thought instead, "Is that really so?"

belated but joyful posting

2006-12-04T19:43:00.000-05:00

Dear all,
I find myself in an overwhelming week of dreadfully packed days and cannot imagine being able to write anything substantial until Friday at the earliest...and maybe even Sunday. I'll be covering the "four poles of the Christian imagination" chapter, and I will need more time (dinner was pizza at the Q74 bus stop). But I didn't want any more time to go by without saying what an enriching experience reading The Triumph of Augustan Poetics has been--just the kind of book that you want to press into the hands of anyone interested in poetry or culture. I wish I had read it years ago. For me this is a model of what a critical book should be. The book is, first of all, extremely generous, opening up all kinds of entrance points into the period--letting you explore all kinds of valleys and streams of your own, testing out the arguments against your own pursuits. But Parker also honors & enriches the reader by offering his opinions of texts and giving you a sense of the intellectual work behind this judgement. I like the way he shows his cards, over and over again--there's a unique combination here of deep thinking and a kind of open-ended joyfully opinionated discerning engagement.

More later. Hours to go before...

Dancing on Bloody Stumps: Samuel Butler's Turn against the Baroque

2006-12-04T16:27:00.000-05:00

Let me begin by saying how much I enjoyed reading this chapter about Butler. It's been a long time since I read a literary history that was as substantial as this one was, which seamlessly integrated intellectual history with literary history in its treatment of the culture of the Baroque, even while it sustained a through-line of argument from beginning to end. For this reason alone, I'm grateful I came upon this book, which to me seems like a natural for teaching in a course like my Restoration-Eighteenth century Preseminar, which is designed to cover the major authors, genres, and issues of our period for grad students beginning work in the long eighteenth.

Since Triumph synthesizes so many of the classic critical texts and arguments I've used for teaching this material (Eliot, Wasserman, Miner, etc.) over the years, it seems like a good choice for that kind of wide-ranging period-based course. One of my recurring experiences while reading the book was seeing Parker explain his constellations of authors (Butler-Swift-Sterne, for example) in ways that I had intuited but never fully articulated to myself. This quality makes it a good model, I think, for those trying to teach students to devise their own literary histories, or trying to write their own.

As I mentioned last night, I also liked the fact that Triumph maintains a global view of generic relations during this period, and tries hard to see these authors as engaged in debates and problems that predate their careers and ramify for the rest of the period. The specifically figurative terms highlighted in this study, terms like "analogy" or "literal," or the period terms, like "Baroque" or "neo-classical" or "Augustan," clearly group together texts from different genres, written for disparate purposes, but which reveal the pressure of a particular episteme on the writers of the same era.

(Incidentally, though BP faults Foucault and the other "Zeitgeist historians" for neglecting the fissures of interest and divisions of thought which mark every culture (24), it's unclear to me how important these fissures are to his own argument, since both Butler and Benlowes, Cowley and Dryden, in their own ways experience a culture-wide "eclipse of analogy," though Benlowes and Cowley suffer an irrevocable irrelevance because they are less capable (or less aware?) than Butler and Dryden of responding to this Zeitgeist shift in their own writings.)

As for Butler, Butler's importance in this account stems from the fact that he represents the first historical instance of what BP calls the "rhetoric of exclusion," (25), the "special elements of modernity in English Restoration and eighteenth-century writing--disaffection from ritual, alienated individualism, positivism, mistrust of language, and the cult of taste" (27). Butler becomes especially important because of his role as formal, stylistic, and moral-intellectual model for the Augustan generation of writers, chiefly Swift and Pope (25), but it seems to me that Butler's advantage over writers like Cowley or even Dryden seems to lie, as with Hobbes, in his self-awareness of his own modernity, and his lack of nostalgia for the inherited authorities that other writers of his generation still tried to rely upon.

In this shared contempt for inherited authorities (classical and biblical), Hobbes along with Butler seem interested in the prestige of the new science, even if they both had deeper interests in the antique or the arcane than earlier commentators had once believed. But I wished while reading this chapter that BP had also spent a little more time considering the fact that perhaps the greatest reason for mid-century writers of every political background to reject inherited authorities was the massive failure of elite culture to protect its interests during the Civil Wars.

This may be my own hobby-horse, but I do think that we could substitute "anti-rhetorical" for BP's "anti-analogy" or "anti-Humanist" while describing Butler or Hobbes, and come up with a fine explanation for what inspired royalists like Hobbes and Bramhall to tangle with one another for much of the mid-century over Free Will. So I wonder whether Parker would accept my substitution of "rhetoric" for "analogy" in this argument, to designate the common enemy for both Butler and Hobbes in the political ruins of the mid-century? (Cf. for example, 48-9)

Though I find no mention of Habermas or Koselleck here, it seems to me that the rhetorical-polemical move BP identifies with Butler--equating Protestant enthusiasm with superstitious Catholic (or Anglican) demands for persecuting one's opponents--is congruent with Habermas and Koselleck's observations about the momentous step taken when Hobbes equated "conscience" with "opinion." (Cf. Public Sphere, 90 and n.) The result was that in Habermas' terms, "it was of no consequence for the state from whose perspective one was worth as much as the other." This doctrinal indifference fosters an erastian distrust of any group who claim a "religious" motivation for their political views, and reinforces a skeptical look at the motives of anyone who uses religious identity as the basis for political participation. This is what underlies what BP calls his "genius to discover the underlying likeness between all the varieties of religious imagination" (33).

I think the emphasis later in the chapter on the intellectual debts of Hume and Gibbon to Butler's "even-handed" rejection of enthusiasm and superstition (what else is there?) reveals something about the polemical strand of Enlightenment hostility to religious institutions and especially popular sectarianism, though I don't think it tells the whole story. I was also intrigued by the few comments about the Butler/Sterne connection, which I think would properly center on the question of the figural in Sterne, and our difficulty in deciding where the boundary between the literal and the figural lies in much of Sterne's bawdy. Calling this quality in Butler novelization seems like a partial gesture, but it doesn't really explain how this kind of figuration traveled from Butler's poetry into Sterne's novelistic prose.

Finally, it seems to me that the closing pages' story of modernization as debasement, materialization, literalization, etc. simply reopen the problem I wondered about at the outset of this essay, which is what authors escape this logic, if these supposedly fissured or uneven set of developments seem nonetheless to demand in every instance a "search for the literal," or a language that "evades the necessity of metaphor"?

Best,

DM

The Augustan Period as a Rethinking of Traditions

2006-12-03T18:48:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Carrie, for setting up this reading and providing us with a very lucid introduction to BP's book and its aims.

Since I'll be posting tomorrow morning on chapter 1, the Samuel Butler chapter, I'll just take up a few issues from yours and Matt's posts. Nonetheless, I think these issues will probably recur in discussion:

For me, the most useful thing about the Triumph is its ability to serve as a case study in the opposing literary-historical problems of periodicity and the persistence of traditions. Even more helpfully, this book really does have the generic breadth that enables BP to view these developments in the broadest possible light.

Here, the key question seems to involve the exact relation of Augustan "neo-classicism" to two forms of inherited or "traditional" (this is BP's term, I think) authority: historical Christianity and classical antiquity. So we have the period-specific uses of Horace or biblical sources, but the sometime puzzling persistence of genres like the epic

In this instance, Parker focuses upon the transition out of the "Baroque" and into the "Augustan" to fashion a larger-scale argument about the birth of modernity, which is treated here as yet another narrative of disenchantment, flattening, loss of collective and sacred meaning, etc. etc. The goal, as far as I can see, is some kind of historicist reanimation of the Baroque, so that its true breadth and depth can be seen from the inside rather than outside.

Carrie's description nicely encapsulates this aspect of the argument:

While the critical history of the Augustan period has always marked the move away from metaphor, flights of imaginative fancy, "superstition" and "enthusiasm," and the shift toward a commitment to empiricism and mimetic description, Parker specifically notes that this shift comes, first, as a total rejection of the aesthetics of traditional Christianity, not necessarily, as the writers of the age would style it, as a "return" to classical values. The only way to get to the aesthetic values of Addison, Pope, and Johnson is by first actively destroying the dominant modes of representation.

I agree with this characterization of the period's novelty, though it doesn't seem at all counter-intuitive to me, or even that surprising, in the wake of, say, Raymond Williams' discussion of the dominant and the residual in Marxism and Literature, or the reception studies of the classical past done by the followers of Warburg, or the recent critics of Swift who have emphasized his affiliations with the Moderns rather than the Ancients. In fact, I would be interested to hear more specifically from Parker who his specific targets were when he wrote this book, or at least what forms of criticism he was writing against. I do agree wholeheartedly, though, with the book's argument that "neo-classicism" nowadays seems a whole lot more "neo" than "classical."

What I am not sure about is whether BP has really gotten beyond the "dissociation of sensibility" thesis of Eliot, since he seems to be arguing for a similarly broad and irrevocable estrangement of poets and poetry from the sacred (or is it from a holistic culture that embraces the sacred?) around the mid-seventeenth century. The anti-rhetorical, anti-figurative, anti-analogical thought of the Augustans was first given memorable expression by Samuel Butler, the poet who invented a form, Hudibrastics, ugly enough to suit his era's political behavior. And as I'll elaborate tomorrow, I find this reading of Butler very convincing.

Nonetheless, what I really wanted from this introduction, and what I didn't quite receive, was a fuller explanation of what BP meant by "the literal" in writing, and what relation this term had to the still-emergent empiricism of the mid-seventeenth century. Here I would second Matt in his questions about the causal relations of literature to philosophy.

What's more, I kept wondering about the exact contours of the big historical break we keep hearing about, and whether it happens fast or slowly, or in a number of places or all at once. But it is nice to hear that Samuel Butler and his writing stand as one of the causes of these momentous changes.

DM

Parker's Intro, Follow-up: The Pace and Dating of Cultural Change

2006-12-03T15:59:00.000-05:00

Carrie, thank you for arranging this event and getting us all started. I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you also for your careful account of Blanford Parker's argument. I appreciate the time you have taken to summarize the complex and wide-ranging argument of the introduction and the ease with which you seem to have done so. My only quarrel with your reading is your claim that Parker details a "slow conceptual divorce of art from the traditional Christian imagination." In fact, I don't think the discursive and imaginative changes described arrive gradually in Parker's literary history at all, but rather arrive suddenly and violently. At various moments, Parker describes the shift from Baroque to Augustan aesthetics as a "rupture," "irruption" and "interruption."

It is not uncommon for scholars of the late 17th century to locate shifts of all kinds in this period, but Parker's attempts to explain the changes are, as Carrie Shanafelt rightly points out, quite radical. What is perhaps unique about Parker's account of the period is that he makes aesthetic shifts primary (as opposed to, say, philosophical shifts). According to Parker, by the end of the 17th century, not only had the conceptual framework of the scholastics been destroyed, but so too had the imaginative foundation upon which it stood. The rhetorical moves made by Hobbes, and Butler in particular, are the necessary precondition not only for the tropes and argumentative structures in Swift and the later Augustans, but also for the emergence of a secular modernity. Parker's implicit argument seems to be that changes in philosophy and religion are predicated upon changes in imaginative associations. The later logics of science, literalism, and positivism depend upon lateral, metonymic, and spatial associations rather than upon analogy, and this shift occurs first in Butler and his contemporaries. Once the change has occurred in poetry, every aspect of culture, literary and intellectual, must come into ideological alignment (despite, of course, the persistence, as Parker quickly points out, of figures like Bunyan, Wesley and Whitefield -- but their rhetoric, too, is sharpened by the need to respond to the changed imaginative landscape, post-Butler).

Because this change must necessarily occur first in the imagination and be made manifest in poetry, it might make sense to argue for the slow growth of a newly organized set of imaginative relationships and associations, their gradual deployment by writers, and a slow seepage of a new ideology into the broader culture. While we might imagine changes in poetic style to be gradual, Parker makes it clear that these changes in style and the attendant intellectual modes they imply are quite sudden. "The process whereby English culture moved from the acrobatic credulity of Browne to the cool and abject skepticism of Hume in less than eighty years was neither automatic nor inevitable… The suddenness and severity of this moment of Augustan interruption is still of the greatest significance in our endless struggle to explain modernity" (24). Here, in addition to arguing for the speed of these changes, he also insists that their occurrence is far from inevitable. I understand this to mean that these changes seem to grow out of acts of imaginative will, deliberate interventions -- both rhetorical and stylistic -- on the level of representation. It is the collective effort of writers and thinkers overthrowing the tyranny of scholasticism, and challenging all at once, through a reordered set of imaginative relationships, the four traditions of Christian theology that Parker argues the Baroque world inherited.

The question remains, and I think it may (still and always) be the central question for students of the Early Modern Period (and of the Enlightenment): how radical is the break and how sudden? What is entirely new, and what remains either transformed, or perhaps fully intact, from one period to the next? Parker is careful to distinguish the changed set of imaginative relationships from what others might call "Zeitgeist." He also challenges Foucault's assumption that the episteme of one period is unknowable to people of another. Furthermore, he argues for a continuity of imagination -- here called modernity -- from the age of Butler to our own age (the age of Colbert? -- Colbert seems to use similar satirical techniques of exclusion and leveling, especially in his efforts to collapse differences between liberals and conservatives). But, despite Parker's efforts to argue that history is not marked by divides across which one generation may fail to recognize another, Parker argues for a pretty sudden and severe shift. No doubt, the Civil War is the great traumatic event allowing for such a compressed period of intellectual change. I am inclined to agree with Parker on this point, but I also try to be cautiously skeptical about such arguments (the most recent being the contemporary tendency to locate in 9/11 the spontaneous birth of an entirely new world).

In the discussion of McKeon's book, Carrie Hintz wrote in one of her comments, "I have medieval colleagues who regularly chastise me (however gently & affectionately) for assuming that the epistomelogical/ cultural/ literary changes which congealed into modernity all emerged in the early modern period." Indeed, I think there is always a danger of arguing too forcefully that everything or most things changed all at once, and in a few years. In a later post, Hintz referred to "habits of mind" as an explanation for such shifts in culture. It seems that Parker is suggesting a transformation in deeply rooted habits of mind in this period. He makes a compelling case for this kind of reading of history, and in locating the changes in style, rhetoric and associative figures makes their seeming suddenness hard to ignore. This, of course, raises one further question, perhaps the hardest of all to work out, and that is whether the associative structures of imaginative literature cause changes in intellectual history, or if they instead register changes already underway.

Introduction: The Christian imagination vs. the critical history

2006-12-03T11:22:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the collaborative reading of Blanford Parker's The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson! We look forward to a great conversation over the next week as we move through this text, with responses to Parker, Parker's responses to us, and our dialogue with one another. Please feel free to jump in at any point in the comments and/or with posts on the front page. Keep in mind that comments over 10,000 characters will be truncated, so if you have something very lengthy to say, consider posting it to the front page (if you are already on our contributors' roster) or emailing it to me and I'll put it up for you. I will begin with a short response to the introduction, and we'll proceed roughly sequentially from there.

Parker's introduction begins with a reframing of the discourse surrounding Augustan aesthetics as a process of rejecting the Baroque, which he describes as a set of aesthetic responses to four traditions of Christian theology, the mystical, logist, fideist, and analogical. The Augustan, for Parker, is not, as has been assumed by most critics, a return to classical, or even the creation of a "neoclassical," aesthetic, but a slow conceptual divorce of art from the traditional Christian imagination.

This divorce begins with the leveling satires of Boileau, Butler, Rochester, Dryden, and Swift, which mock not Christianity itself, but the imaginative excesses of Christian thought, "the 'acrostic land' of the logist; the maddened, inward 'aeolist' imagination of the fideist; the self-lacerating obsessions of the mystic; and most of all the empty conceits of the analogists" (2). While the critical history of the Augustan period has always marked the move away from metaphor, flights of imaginative fancy, "superstition" and "enthusiasm," and the shift toward a commitment to empiricism and mimetic description, Parker specifically notes that this shift comes, first, as a total rejection of the aesthetics of traditional Christianity, not necessarily, as the writers of the age would style it, as a "return" to classical values. The only way to get to the aesthetic values of Addison, Pope, and Johnson is by first actively destroying the dominant modes of representation.

This move is, of course, never separate from the historical relationship of the seventeenth century succession to the rise of religious faction. No aesthetic movement is ahistorical. "Augustan literature," Parker writes, "was the first great victory over the culture of analogy, memorial authority, and traditional theology, and their classicism is no more backward-looking or authentic than that of Shelley or even Joyce" (7). Parker argues against the twentieth century critical history that has compressed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics so that "Leavis [...] and Brooks [...] began to see the same virtues of figural compression and even conceit in Pope and Gray that Eliot had discovered in Donne" (9). That is, the distinctions that were so self-consciously made across a hundred and fifty years of poetry, that moved from the theological and aesthetic excesses of the "metaphysicals" to the empirically descriptive poets of the high Augustan, have been minimized from the great distance of the New Critical era, and that compression has, to some extent, not been remedied in the intervening years.

The poverty of criticism in the period is partially to blame. Parker notes that the poetry between the late Renaissance and the Romantic eras are not well read even in primary texts, much less in critical ones. He also faults the "too rigorous distinction between the prose and poetic genres of the period" (12) for the lack of criticism on Augustan aesthetics. It has been easy for criticism like T.S. Eliot's to become ascendant and remain, always, on the table when so few have offered to correct it. Parker's extended criticism of Eliot's misrepresentation of the Augustan as a "revolt against the 'descriptive'" (18) demonstrates the intrusion of Eliot's own aesthetic commitments into his treatment of the era.

But while Parker faults Eliot for compressing the Augustan into a modern fantasy of historicized poetic difference, he criticizes Foucault for the opposite—removing the Augustan from its Baroque roots and setting it alongside the undeniably modern. That is, Parker feels Foucault is guilty of being duped by the rhetoric of the Augustan, which self-consciously attempts to erase its own history for the sake of innovation, while, as Parker shows in the first chapters of the Triumph, tendrils of surviving Baroque "excesses" still spring up everywhere in transitional Augustan poetry.

This seems to me to be a book that has the potential to radically reconfigure our understanding of the Augustan era, and to allow both for historical attention to the origins of eighteenth-century aesthetics and for the innovations of the era. I look forward to seeing how you feel this approach could be applied to criticsm and even pedagogy, and I will respond further in the comments.

The Price of Innovation

2006-12-03T11:06:00.000-05:00

Commenting on the “Blogs and Wikis” thread below, Carrie Shanafelt wrote,

Every time I try to introduce innovative methods and texts that my English majors don't expect, it ends up benefitting those who work hard and are curious and penalizing those who are just trying to get a C. That is, I feel the more pedagogically sound my teaching is, the more my classes' grades split into As and Fs.

Do others attempting innovative teaching methods encounter this phenomenon? When we try to get students to interact with difficult course material in new ways, does it inevitably punish the students with lackluster academic skills and reward those who come to the class with better preparation for success?

I was struck by Carrie’s comment because her wiki assignment strikes me as an excellent way to meet the learning needs of a certain kind of “C” student: the ones who are willing to make an effort but who (for whatever reason) write poorly and have trouble figuring out how to do the interpretive close reading that gets rewarded in the literature classroom. Asking all students to produce a chunk of information on schedule seems like a great way to use and reward the skills that these “C” students bring to the course. It also seems like an entirely appropriate way to punish the other kind of “C” student—the ones who could do better but choose not to as they run down the clock on their degrees. The expectations and requirements for success are clearly spelled out, as are the consequences for not meeting them. It’s not the instructor’s responsibility to translate students’ willful mediocrity into precisely the mediocre grades they think they deserve. But perhaps in the context of a variety of writing assignments that go against the grain of lit-class practice, weaker students don’t perceive the distinctions between the skills that are being drawn on and just get generally discouraged?

I guess I’m wondering if the A/F bifurcation Carrie is observing just polarizes the range that would be there in a more traditional incarnation of this class, or if innovative methods rearrange the categories of excellence such that talented students who coast get punished more than they would by less innovative methods, and hardworking but intellectually limited students get rewarded more?

My own efforts at innovation in my Enlightenment class seem to have produced a different kind of dynamic. A higher percentage of the class than in the past seems to be engaged with the material and willing to make an effort to understand, interpret, and contextualize it, but the remainder that hasn’t been bought on board (though smaller) seems much more resistant and entrenched than in the past. It’s as if the more I make C18 material accessible and comprehensible to students, the more room I give the ones who dislike it to really hate it, and to assert their inability to shake the assumptions they came in with. It's gratifying that this semester this hostility seems focused on the material and not me, but otherwise I’m not sure if this phenomenon counts as progress or not.

Anyone else care to take a break from end-of-semester grading to reflect on the price of innovation?

Blogs and Wikis for Undergrads

2006-12-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

As some of us prepare for next semester's teaching, I'd like to propose a variation on Dave's thread below: using blogs or wikis for undergraduate C18 teaching.

I've tried using WebCT to generate online discussions in previous classes, with only limited success. Part of the problem is that WebCT in my institution has a reputation for being slow, cumbersome, and unreliable--and it seems to crash spectacularly at least once a semester--so students tend to regard it with suspicion. The other problem is that I haven't been able to come up with a way of requiring and evaluating online discussions that doesn't seem strained and artificial, inadvertently stifling the potential of the medium for provoking original, spontaneous, and risky thought.

Moving away from WebCT to other formats would solve the first problem. I've looked at Carrie Shanafelt's wiki (which I gather takes the form of Wikipedia, but doesn't actually interact with the "real" Wikipedia that created such problems for Thalia's Daughters--correct me if I've got this wrong). And clearly, I have also perused Miriam Jones's course blogs. I see a lot in both formats that I would like to emulate, but I'd like to know more about the potential problems and pitfalls of the form. Do students balk at creating the necessary online identity? Do they actually read each other's posts, comments, and wiki entries? How do you encourage them to respond to each other? Has the public availability of the sites been a problem? Do students find it reasonable to post to both a blog and a wiki among their other course requirements?

I know Carrie and Miriam have both discussed their use of these course elements already on this site, but I would be interested in knowing more about these kinds of nuts-and-bolts issues from them, and from anyone else currently blogging and wiki-ing with success. I would also be interested in hearing the experiences of people who have not found it pedagogically useful to take their students online, or who have been stymied by logistical problems.

William Empson, Hero of Modern Criticism

2006-12-01T00:24:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of those mannish men who populate the Valve, I'm passing along two good LRB reviews of William Empson's recently published letters and biography, edited and written, respectively, by John Haffenden. The first is a memoir/review by Frank Kermode, the second an essay by Adam Phillips.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n22/kerm01_.html

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n15/phil01_.html

Kermode talks from personal experience, and gives us his own insights into Empson's truly appalling personal hygiene, along with a few unappealing details from Empson's love life. Phillips' essay seems to me to be the more insightful, and I appreciated this description of E's non-method:

He was a critic with an idiosyncratic intelligence and without a method – so he could be admired but not followed. He didn’t want to gang up to bully the bullies; what he was after was piecemeal refutation of unacceptable arguments whenever they occurred. Letters were one of the ways in which he could do this. ‘What else does one write criticism for except to win agreement?’ he asks in a letter to Christopher Ricks, and yet the winning of agreement – or perhaps the winning of too much agreement, the way literature coerced assent instead of opening argument – was the very thing that troubled Empson.

. . . .

‘The more one understands one’s own reactions,’ Empson wrote in Seven Types of Ambiguity, ‘the less one is at their mercy.’ The possibility of disagreement was, I think, mostly evidence for Empson that one was not at anyone’s mercy. The writer could be at the mercy of his conflicts, just as the critic could be at the mercy of the text, or the institution that employed him. So the Empson who believed that the most morally disreputable thing a writer could do was suppress the conflicts that animated him, the Empson who preferred a clash to a consensus, could also write in a letter when he was in his sixties that ‘poetry is insincere unless it is clinical, resolving conflicts in the author and thus preventing him from going mad; to do this it must satisfy himself as completely unconfused and indeed bare; and if the effects of doing this were trying for the reader, that was nothing to worry about – he could have the pleasure of doing a puzzle.

A similar, ultimately rationalistic tactic characterizes his Structure of Complex Words, I'd argue, whereby we learn very patiently to unfold the "doctrines" contained within Complex Words so that they lose their force over us.

And yet alongside the Structures, my personal favorite, we have to consider Milton's God, which has a passage that Kermode points out as one of the best, most thoroughgoing responses to Pascal's Wager he knows of:

[Pascal] argued, while more or less inventing the mathematics of Probability, that since the penalties for disbelief in Christianity are infinitely horrible and enduring, therefore, if there is any probability, however tiny (but finite) that the assertions of religion are true, a reasonable man will endure any degree of pain and shame on earth (since this is known beforehand to be finite) on the mere chance that the assertions are true. The answer is political, not mathematical; this argument makes Pascal the slave of any person, professing any doctrine, who has the impudence to tell him a sufficiently extravagant lie. A man ought therefore to reject such a calculation; and I feel there has been a strange and unpleasant moral collapse during my own lifetime, because so many of our present literary mentors not only accept it but talk as if that was a moral thing to do. Clearly, if you have reduced morality to keeping the taboos imposed by an infinite malignity, you can have no sense of personal honour or of the public good.

Whatever one thinks[writes Kermode], whatever Pascal might have said about this, it is rather thrilling to have Christian doctrine lined up against ‘personal honour’ and ‘the public good’, and in such strong Johnsonian prose. But the voice is the true voice of Empson. He even calls Pascal ‘neo-Christian’, thus grouping him with his own craven and shameless contemporaries who don’t even pretend to believe in their religion; ‘they regard it as a general moral truth that one ought to tell lies in favour of the side which is sure to win.’

This "political" reading of Pascal's authoritarian forms of prediction fascinatingly anticipates views like those found in Suskind's One-Percent Doctrine, transforming the ascetic Pascal into a repulsive, Cheneyesque figure.

I have always felt there was some affinity between Johnson and Empson, apart from their views on the deity, and I think we may have found it here on Pascal. There is, certainly, a willingness to label others not just immoral but disgusting. But somehow, in the course of making those judgments, and even while arguing for them, Empson never loses sight of the conflicts that motivated those judgments in the first place.

Best,

DM

Housekeeping #3

2006-11-30T17:22:00.000-05:00

I have been a bad housekeeper. It seems like a good time now, before our second collaborative reading, to take stock of the status of The Long Eighteenth.

(Click the graphic to enlarge.)

Our upcoming reading will include posts by myself, Dave Mazella, Jen Golightly, Bill Levine, Alex Seltzer, Carrie Hintz, "KW," Shayda Hoover, and Blanford Parker, as well as anyone else who chooses to jump in. (Don't be shy!) I met with Blanford this morning and he is looking forward to our conversation.

Please feel free to publicize this event to your colleagues.

Blogging or Web CT in Graduate Seminars?

2006-11-28T12:39:00.000-05:00

We had our final meeting in my Austen and her Predecessors grad seminar last night, and I was pretty pleased with our final discussions of Persuasion. (It's interesting, by the way, how personally I take those discussions, if it's a book I'm really invested in. Fortunately for me, I find that Austen is one of the few writers I teach whose works are never a hard sell; students almost always come in with a lot of enthusiasm for, and interest in, her writing.)

I'll probably post something more definitive on the course in a little while, perhaps after I see how the papers and final projects go, but for now I want to discuss a topic that emerged from my "unfinished business" post of last week. Since I've never blogged while teaching a course, I've been experimenting this term with using this blog as an additional venue for reflection and discussion, and it occurred to me that I could also encourage (i.e., require) my students essentially to do the same kind of writing, either in a public blog or in some Web CT format, which I'm not very familiar with.

After posting last week, I discussed it with the class, and I was surprised to hear that a number of my colleagues had been doing such things in their grad seminars for some time, usually by requiring students to post and respond to their readings or to one another. I was also surprised that students were as receptive to the idea as they seemed. I had a bad experience with an undergrad class listserv ages ago, and I'm very concerned about requiring something that would seem like "makework" to our students. But it also sounds like something that could be very effective for encouraging better discussion.

So I'm putting it out there. Any suggestions, advice, or experiences you'd like to share about using a blog or Web CT fora for class discussions at the grad level?

Thanks,

DM

What would you like to see in new editions of novels?

2006-11-26T14:41:00.000-05:00

Strictly hypothetically, if a publisher were to produce a new line of 18c novels, what would you like to see in terms of editorial policy?

There are of course a dozen ways to buy, say, Robinson Crusoe. The market is competitive. You have the Penguin edition, the Norton, the Oxford World's Classics, the Bedford Cultural Edition, and the Broadview. There are still others for general readers--Signet, Barnes & Noble, Everyman, etc.

If there were to be one more available, what would you like for it to include or exclude that would set it apart from the other editions? Do you and your students actually use the substantial textual and critical support routinely included in the Nortons and the Broadview editions? Do you find the current scholarly editions limiting or overwhelming? Are your students happy with their prices, the format, etc.?

Specifically, how would you feel about the return of the hardback edition? If Penguin, for example, were to publish the same text, introduction, and notes in a hardback edition with more durable paper within $5 or so of their paperback price, would you order that book for your students instead and do you think they would be glad you did?

Dates Finalized for Parker

2006-11-26T00:56:00.000-05:00

I've heard from Professor Parker and he's verified that the week of December 3rd is good for the group reading, so I will put it in our sidebar and send another note to C18-L. Please feel free to publicize this event wherever it is you publicize things! The conversation that comes out of this book should be useful to scholars at all levels and in most areas of interest in our era of English literary studies.

I also would like to remind the assembled that we still have ~~two~~one chapters ("Transitional Augustan Poetry" and "Johnson and Fideism") available for anyone who'd like to lead discussion on those days. If we don't have a volunteer, I will go enlist one of my colleagues, or, especially in the case of the Johnson chapter, I may just do it myself. Also remember that, as with the McKeon discussion, anyone should feel free to jump in with a post at any point in the conversation. The purpose of the schedule is merely to ensure we cover the whole book, not to stifle any other ideas that come to mind.

(Isn't it nice not to be doing this with the constraints of either print or a conference panel?)

~~Also, Bill Levine, if you're reading this, please send me an email at carrieshanafelt at gmail.com so I can add you to our roster of contributors.~~ Done.

Rounding out the semester with Austen's Sense and Sensibility

2006-11-23T11:03:00.000-05:00

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, with an appropriately Dickensian feast at mid-day, and without any Pumblechookian elbows being thrown. (Orwell once made a crack about Dickens' endings, which simply imagined the future as a endless succession of enormous meals).

This is the second to last week of the semester, the time when I really start feeling regrets over what I haven't said or discussed or elaborated properly during the semester.

[Incidentally, A colleague of mine in Anthro just told me that he uses Web CT to deal with this issue in his undergrad classes, since he can post whatever portion of his lectures he failed to deliver during the allotted time. I must say this is intriguing, though I wonder whether my undergrad students would follow those kinds of readings up, when it's hard enough to get them through the required readings. I suppose it would work best if one lectured from fairly finished notes, which I generally don't do.]

In any case, I've been thinking this week of what I haven't really taken up in the Austen grad seminar, largely because during the give and take of discussion, it just never seemed the right moment. Maybe I'll do an "Unfinished Business" segment in our next and final meeting, asking everyone to think of an issue that they'd wished had been followed up during discussion.

Here's my unfinished business, anyway:

1. The literary status of the novel, as signified by the famous defense in Northanger Abbey. I've never bought the notion that NA represented a purely destructive parody of the gothic, for the same reason that the Juvenilia for me never represented simply the annihilation of sentimental paradigms.

I always thought that there was some kind of criticism--displacement--recuperation process going on there, with new forms of distinction developed for fiction and fiction-readers, with the result being a certain "psychological" realism being equated with literariness, at the expense of bodily displays of sentiment, exotic location, "melodramatic" plot, and the broader view of society and the social order fostered by novelists between Richardson and Wollstonecraft. So I think that the refunctioning of the sentimental novel (and the sentimental heroine) that occurs in Austen must entail a new sense of what the novel as a genre can and cannot, should and should not, attempt to accomplish. For me, this is the big literary-historical significance of Austen: she helps redefine the function of the novel "after" the sentimental novel has run its course (a demise, of course, that she helped to hasten)

This brings me to my other unfinished business:

2. Austen's relation to the prudential narratives and conduct-book morality that we can still sense in, say, Evelina's struggles with propriety and delicacy, seems really strategic, if not inconsistent. I suppose this is where I agree with Marilyn Butler, though I'm not sure it represents an aesthetic fault in the way that Butler assumes.

Sense and Sensibility to me has the classic didactic structure of the comparison of the respective fates of parallel characters, and features a not-quite-punitive lesson for its imprudent "sensible" Marianne, and a not-quite-satisfying reward for its prudent, quietly stoic and "sensible" [in the other sense, right?] Elinor. One might say that the point of the novel is to question whether lives as arbitrarily determined as E and M's can be described as "lessons to be learned." But the prudence of E does not really seem to guarantee much happiness, and the imprudence of M, though certainly dangerous and self-indulgent at times, does not seem inferior to the calculation and self-seeking of the Steeles. So my guess is that the real issue in S&S lies in the viability of the didactic structure that she has nonetheless retained for this novel.

So there you go. Two unfinished thoughts that somehow never came up in discussion, with only three more hours of classtime before this semester comes to an end.

Best,

DM

Postscript: Though the Web CT option might work fine for an undergrad class, I'm still thinking about ways to make the relatively limited number of hours in a grad seminar work more effectively.

I'm seriously considering adding some type of blogging or online writing component (possibly Web CT, but maybe just a regular public blog) to the seminar to deal with this problem of my own sense of unfinished business, though I'm very conscious of the limited number of hours grad students have available to prep their classes, and whether going through my afterthoughts in this manner would be productive for anyone. I also wonder how formal my own presentations would have to become to work in this format. And, lastly, I should note one thing: when I wondered aloud about students bothering to make it through such notes, I was thinking about my undergrads, not my grads. (Thanks to SD for helping me clarify this point)

Best wishes,

DM

Finals bad! Hulk smash!

2006-11-21T13:46:00.000-05:00

Briefly, I will note that I've updated the Parker reading schedule here. There is just one chapter up for grabs, though I encourage any of our contributors to feel free to post at any point during the reading alongside the scheduled posts.

As I think about things coming up in December, I realize I have to give a final exam to my British Literature Survey students. I am dreading both writing the exam and grading it, as both will make me come face-to-face with the problem of what different groups of students are actually learning from my class.

This is, as I've mentioned before, my first class whose focus is on absorbing a body of literature, as opposed to learning about writing or analytical methodologies. (My evaluator seemed to think I had turned my Brit Lit Survey into a methodology course, which I think was a compliment.) At the end of the semester, I not only need evidence that my students are able to analyze poems and do a lit-crit research paper on a novel, but I also require proof that they, like, read the stuff on the syllabus. I can't pass someone who can't name some Romantic poets.

In the past, when I've been told to give a final exam, if my students seemed to be keeping up just fine with the material during the daily writing, I've followed the example of one of my favorite undergraduate professors and cancelled the final, asking them all instead to read a shortish novel of my choice and to lead a discussion during the allotted final hours. I would grade them on their ability to focus on passages, come up with interesting interpretations, and respond to one another's ideas. Usually, I bring a nice red velvet cake and some nut brittle. It's a pleasant way to end a semester, and everyone goes home feeling good about themselves.

But this semester, there have been too many students, too many readings, and too many absences for me to keep up with who is doing the reading. Every day, when they come into class, I ask them difficult analytical questions as a little seven-minute writing prompt. When I get their responses, it is easy to tell who the best students are because they have clearly read the material to a depth that allows for this level of thought. The rest of the responses I get are usually so off-base that I simply cannot tell whether they've not done the reading, or whether they have, but need help knowing what it means. There is a level of difficulty that allows the best students to shine, but levels out the rest of the students to the point of unevaluability.

So in order to give some kind of credit for just having followed along at a basic level, I have to give a quizzy final. Of course I'd rather do an analytical thing where I ask for differences between Renaissance and Augustan aesthetics, but not all of my students are really able to follow along at that level. Some of my students will feel cheated because sitting around memorizing the syllabus isn't going to help them, and the students who missed a lot of classes will certainly fail, since they've missed so much lecture and discussion content. On the other hand, if I give a quizzy "who/what/when" final, the better students in the class, who are keeping up marvelously with the sense of the passage of time and the changes in prose and poetry, may not remember what the titles of the poems we read are, and they will wonder what all that heavy-duty talk about aesthetics and ethics was about.

Is it possible to balance the two? Who here has written final exams for lit surveys before? What did you do? What worked? What didn't?

Patriotism and Nationalism in the Long Eighteenth

2006-11-19T23:59:00.000-05:00

My exchanges with Jen over the late-18th novel, romantic or otherwise, have reminded me of how problematic a term like "nationalism" really is when we discuss most writers in the long eighteenth. Nationalism, like Empire, seems like a word with a teleology built right into it, and which consequently makes it hard to read contingent events as anything BUT movements toward some nineteenth-century destination. But is this really true?

For one thing, patriotism is even harder for us to understand than some so-called "rise of the nation," because of patriotism's associations with radicalism and Wilkite agitation in the mid-century. But clearly one of the stakes in the 1790s was about which conception of the nation, and of the people, either radical or conservative, would win out over the other. To the participants in those debates, the outcome hardly felt preordained.

So what kinds of primary texts, genres, and authors, and what kinds of scholarly arguments do you draw upon when you try to think about the nation in the long eighteenth?

Best,

DM

It's Time for Teaching Carnival #16!

2006-11-17T12:19:00.000-05:00

OK, folks, this round of the Teaching Carnival is taking place at Ancarett's Abode, at this address:

http://ancarett.com/?p=329

Lotsa useful stuff, particularly at this panicky time of the semester. Highly recommended.

Best,

DM

In which my obsession with Romantic novel continues

2006-11-16T16:28:00.000-05:00

I've just finished reading an essay by Robert Miles, published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.2 (Spring 2001), titled "What is a Romantic Novel?" It's an interesting essay; Miles investigates the "embarassment" with which he says the Romantic novel has always been viewed as a result of the institutionalization of Romanticism. He identifies what he terms the "hermeneutic paradigm" as part of this institutionalization and describes this paradigm as one focused primarily on the transcendental aspect of Romanticism--and thus on Romantic poetry. Miles writes, "The hermeneutic paradigm the Kantian narrative was designed to protect can best be put in terms of transcendentalism. To the Romantic poet, as Romantic hero, there falls the task of peering into the life of things in order to spy out the noumenal presence that ultimately binds together subject and object, words and things, the material world and its underlying meaning, a transcendental glimpse capable of rebuilding the ruins of history" (184).

Thus Miles says the problem in defining the Romantic novel is actually a problem of defining Romanticism itself: "'What is a Romantic novel?' is a version of another, equally problematic question: what is Romanticism?" (184). Transcendentalism as a defining characteristic of Romanticism will of course lead to definitions of Romanticism that privilege poetry: "The centrality of the hermeneutic paradigm in the construction of Romanticism adversely affected the reception of the Romantic novel, as even the subjectively driven Romantic novel...with its residual attachments to narrative, community, and realism, is at a disadvantage in comparison with poetry when it comes to giving literary form to the drama of fleeting transcendental insights" (185). Miles goes on to suggest that Romantic poetry and the Romantic novel actually have more in common than has been hitherto suggested. He argues that the basis for the Romantic novel is its "historic mission of articulating ideology, as ideology. Of course, all works are ideological, as everything else is too. My proposition, rather, is that a significant difference of a subset of Romantic-era novels is their striving toward not ideological representation, but representations of ideology as 'ideology.' I am not saying that the Romantic novel does this, and the Romantic poem does not. On the contrary, I am arguing that this is an important affinity between the two" (186).

Using this idea as the basis for his definition, Miles goes on to identify several characteristics of the Romantic novel: it is, he writes, preoccupied with questions about family origin, a feature that he finds to be drawn from Shakespeare's romances; it makes extensive use of theatricality as characters whose family origin is unknown struggle with questions about their identities and thus take on a variety of "roles," usually linked to a particular nationality; and it employs a self-conscious rejection of the novel in favor of the romance, which, Miles suggests, allows writers to explore positions outside history and probability. It is in these novels, according to Miles, that we can first see an awareness of ideology as ideology in the modern sense.

Here's my standard disclaimer: by no means am I doing justice to Miles' argument, which is quite "involved," as he himself admits. However, I am troubled by two aspects of his essay, and the first is that it seems to focus selectively on national tales, novels that deal primarily with questions of national and/or family origin as their primary plot. For instance, he talks a great deal about Sir Walter Scott's novels, particularly Ivanhoe. He traces the type of novel he's describing (which, by the way, he calls "philosophical romances" rather than "Romantic novels," though he uses both terms) up through the novels of Hawthorne and Melville: "If the philosophical romance is antagonistic toward the renewed legitimacies of nationalism, it remains the case that both it and nationalism arise out of the same cultural moment of questioned origins. Hence the unsurprising recrudescence of the philosophical romance in Ireland, Scotland, and mid-nineteenth century America, as these were similarly rich periods in which the spirit of critique conflicted directly with nationalist myth-making" (198). By the end of the essay, the focus of Miles' observations about the Romantic novel are all pointed toward this sort of nationalism or rejection of nationalism, which is interesting to me in the extreme but seems to exclude a large number of novels that other scholars have termed Romantic novels--primarily (of course, for me) the Jacobin novels of the 1790s. This leads to my second reservation about Miles' essay: though he writes that "No theory of the Romantic novel that did not account for Caleb Williams or Frankenstein would be worth much," he really only devotes a paragraph or two to Godwin at all, and the bulk of this discussion does not concern Caleb Williams but rather Godwin's unfinished essay "Of History and Romance" (197). The other Jacobin novelists are not mentioned at all: the exception is Mary Hays, who is mentioned in passing by name only in a list of writers. This seems to me (as it of course would) a striking omission in an essay arguing that the Romantic novel is "the class of prose fictions that has the historic mission of articulating ideology, as ideology" (186). However, by the end of the essay, it seems that Miles' argument is focused on a specific type of ideology--nationalism--and the ways in which the Romantic novel was deployed against this ideology. At this point, the Jacobin novels of the 1790s no longer seem to fit with his definition. I don't find, for instance, massive concern with questions of origin in the Jacobin novels, especially national origin, nor do I find theatricality a prominent feature in the novels I have studied.

And so while I am intrigued by his ideas about form--he writes at length about the special form of romance employed by these novels and its connection to epic--at last I remain frustrated by the problems that seem to me inherent in the use of the term "Romantic novel." As always when I read these essays, I am left thinking of many, many examples of works that are omitted or excluded through the attempt to pin down what precisely determines which novels are "Romantic." My suspicion is that the definitions of "the Romantic novel" depend in large measure (as is perhaps obvious) upon the particular works being used as examples. Thus, if you use Sir Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Maturin, and Clara Reeve as your core group of Romantic novelists, you get a very different idea of what the Romantic novel is than if you use Jane Austen and Frances Burney, or Mary Shelley, William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe, or indeed Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charlotte Smith. My other suspicion is that this problem is precisely why so many Romantic scholars now define Romanticism by period rather than by characteristics: the most obvious similiarity of these works is their historical situation.

Upcoming reading of Parker

2006-11-16T16:18:00.000-05:00

All systems are go for a group reading of Blanford Parker's The Triumph of Augustan Poetics. I think we decided that things are very busy for people around Thanksgiving, but sometime in the weeks that follow would be good. I think Prof. Parker is flexible then. What about the first week in December? We could start Sunday, Dec. 3rd and carry it through the week.

For those who'd like to volunteer, let us begin choosing specific chapters. I am happy to cover whatever anyone doesn't volunteer for, but Parker writes extremely interesting things about people I don't feel like much of an expert on, like Butler and Thomson. If you see something in your area of study here, don't be too shy to lay a claim on it. Below are the chapters and their subtitles.

Please volunteer in the comments so we all know what you'd like to do, and I'll update this post with the names (or pseudonyms) of participants. Likewise, I'll post this to C18-L to see if there are any of our other colleagues who'd like to jump on board.

Introduction (Shanafelt)

1. Samuel Butler and the end of analogy (Mazella)
The curious man, Butler and the formula of exclusion, The low road of the Augustan

2. Transitional Augustan poetry
The eclipse of analogy, The cases of Cowley and Dryden, The transformation of prose style, The reinvention of nature, Benlowes: the survival of conceit

3. Pope and mature Augustanism (Golightly)
Belinda alone in the world of things, Pope's spatial art

4. Thomson and the invention of the literal (Levine)
The new objects of poetry, Augustan naturalism, The anxious eye: Thomson's Summer

5. The four poles of the Christian imagination in relation to Augustanism (Hintz)
Introduction, The four poles of Christian poetics, The logist, The analogical, The mystical, The fideist

6. The fideist reaction (KW)
Fideism in Restoration and eighteenth-century culture, Prior's fideism, Solomon and David, Young's Night Thoughts

7. Johnson and fideism (Hoover)
Fideism and humanism, The two Johnsons, Johnson and the critique of analogy, Epilogue

Jane Austen's Juvenilia

2006-11-14T07:56:00.000-05:00

Chapter the 10th

Cassandra was next accosted by her freind the Widow, who squeezing out her little Head thro' her less window, asked her how she did? Cassandra curtseyed and went on.

(from The Beautifull Cassandra. A novel in twelve chapters, in Doody, ed., Catherine (42)).

The grad novel class has finally reached some of my favorite materials in this course, Austen's juvenilia. For whatever reason, students feel less inhibited about commenting about her style and her technique when these are laid out in her tiny vignettes. I sometimes feel that Austen's novels appear so strong, and so self-sufficient, that students, even grad students, feel that they have little to say about them except in terms of her characters. And since I've been pushing the literary historical reading of the novel this term, I want students to see JA as a reader and, in effect, as a critic, as she engages in those early parodies.

One of the effects of teaching this course has been to force me back onto my chronologies, and to think about Wollstonecraft's struggles with the novel form in the eighties and nineties, while a 15 year old Austen seems able to swallow Burney whole, and deliver up exquisite little routines like the masking scene in Jack and Alice, where we admire a male Masker dressed as the Sun:

The Beams that darted from his Eyes were like those of that glorious Luminary, tho' infinitely superior. So strong were they that no one dared venture within half a mile of them; he had therefore the best part of the Room to himself, its size not amounting to more than 3 quarters of a mile in length and half a one in breadth. The Gentlemen at last finding the fierceness of his beams to be very inconvenient to the concourse by obliging them to croud together in one corner of the room, half shut his eyes by which means, the Company discovered him to be Charles Adams in his plain green Coat, without any Mask at all (12).

This is as good a joke as I've seen on the male paragon, which I suppose is as much Grandison as anything else, but a lot of the class were left wishing that they had more like this in Austen (oddly, this semisurrealist style seems to have crept back into Sanditon). There is something so consciously indelicate in these skits, so deliberately improper, and so inventive stylistically, that everyone was hoping to see a whole novel like this.

Having said all that, I always feel a twinge teaching Austen, because I believe that Austen's reworking of the sentimental novel helped to eclipse, permanently, her sources: Johnson, Richardson, Lennox, Burney, Edgeworth, possibly even Wollstonecraft, all these writers never seemed the same after she was done. She is a strong reader, perhaps one of the best readers of the preceding century's fiction, and as such she becomes as much an obstacle as an aid to understanding the writing that she reworked. And I wonder whether my own loyalties are with her or with the eighteenth century writers whose work made that amazing self-assurance possible.

Best wishes,

DM

R.I.P. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

2006-11-12T23:07:00.000-05:00

This may seem a peculiar thing to run on an eighteenth-century blog, but I only learned about it this weekend (no obit in my local paper), and dammit, he was a fine writer and essayist, and someone whose review essays I always enjoyed rereading in the NYRB. So here's the official announcement from the Institute for Advanced Study:

http://www.ias.edu/Newsroom/announcements/Uploads/view.php?cmd=view&id=354

I've always thought Geertz had an underestimated impact on literary and especially cultural studies with his notion of "thick description." But that's for another day. Pay tribute to the man, the next time you teach his "Balinese Cockfight" essay.

Best wishes,

DM

PS: I forgot to mention that our Sharon has a nice post, with useful links, on her blog, Early Modern Notes, at

http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/

DM

Teaching Carnival #15, etc. etc.

2006-11-11T21:53:00.000-05:00

Since we've had some good, substantive teaching-talk this week from Carrie, KW, and MH, I'd urge everyone to look at the latest Teaching Carnival, which is hosted here:

http://newkidonthehallway.typepad.com/new_kid_on_the_hallway/2006/11/another_damned_.html

with the permanent site at this location:

http://teachingcarnival.blogspot.com/

This is a great pedagogical resource, and please report back to us if you found anything particularly helpful (or maybe less than helpful).

If others have syllabi or proposals they'd like to share, please pass those along. Teaching anecdotes, heart-warming or otherwise? Let us know.

Best wishes,

DM

So what is your view of student-centered learning, Prof. Foucault?

2006-11-09T17:38:00.000-05:00

For example, with regard to the pedagogical relation--I mean the relation of teaching, the passage from the one who knows the most to the one who knows the least--it is not certain that self-management is what produces the best results; nothing proves, on the contrary, that that approach isn't a hindrance . . . .

. . . . .

I would say, rather, that [the goal of consensus] is perhaps a critical idea to maintain at all times: to ask oneself what proportion of nonconsensuality is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of nonconsensuality is necessary or not, and then one may question every power relation to that extent. The farthest I would go is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.--from "Politics and Ethics: An Interview," in Foucault Reader, 378-9.

What makes a successful discussion?

2006-11-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

In light of a meeting I am having tomorrow with the faculty member who observed my class this semester, I have been giving some thought to the problem of deciding whether a class discussion has been successful. I'm beginning to think our measurement of success is almost completely dependent on the subject matter and goals of the course.

When I was taking composition pedagogy back at Case Western Reserve, I read plenty of material arguing that the only good class discussions are ones in which the students themselves are creating questions, addressing one another, feeling free to analyze relevant personal experience, and so forth. That is, in the ideal composition classroom, students are creating the content, leading discussion on the content, and responding to one another's comments. The instructor should, after modelling this behavior, barely be in the room at all. In order to create this kind of environment, there has to be almost constant sharing of their written content, an appropriate model and direction for the conversation, and trusting relationships between class members, usually created in group work. If the class gets off-topic, then and only then is it up to the instructor to figure out how to reinterpret the ongoing conversation in a way that will result in learning.

And when I teach composition, I shoot for this model. They do lots of peer review and are responsible for leading most of their own discussions of the reading. I try to assign readings that are immediately translatable by them into useful writing skills, like essays from Dave Eggers's Best American Nonrequired Reading series. They're current, they cover a wide variety of subject matter, they clearly demonstrate various rhetorical and creative strategies, and they require very little prodding by me to get students to relate to them and respond to them as models of writing. Also, in the composition classroom, emerging with a clear understanding of all the readings is not as important as being able to use the readings as a model for written work.

But when I started teaching Intro to Lit, I realized the difference in the content of the class made a huge difference in how I conducted class discussion. I tried putting them in groups to discuss the readings, but I noticed as I walked around that, since discussion wasn't about their own content, only a few students in the class were participating in the group conversations. And though I tried to insert a few comments and questions here and there, the readings were simply too difficult for them to lead the conversation on their own. I found their personal anecdotes in relations to texts to be mostly irrelevant, and I saw some eyes going dull with frustration when a student held onto the conch too long. The more I taught Intro to Lit, the more I found myself removing those opportunities for the class to guide itself. I went from a model in which five groups each chose one of five books to discuss and research to a model in which everyone read Les Liaisons dangereuses and I led the discussion. Everyone seemed happier, even if it wasn't following the more desirable model of a "successful conversation."

In my current British Literature survey, I have finally become a tyrant. We still sit in a circle, and I give them seven minutes at the beginning of each class to answer a few written questions and get their heads in gear for the day's discussion, but now most of the class is me reading passages, asking questions, calling on everyone who raises a hand, responding to their comments, providing a little historical/biographical background, suggesting connections with other authors we've read, trying to repeat as boldly as possible anything fruitful that comes up, returning to comments made during previous weeks, and even giving a little personal content of my own. My students seem to really love the class, and they have developed into quite sophisticated readers and thinkers about literary history, but I can't help but feel something has been lost.

My observer told me he was extremely impressed by the sophistication and excitement expressed by my students, and that he liked how they came up with difficult connections between authors and eras on their own, but he challenged me to think of ways to move away from the question-answer-evaluation model of class discussion. I'm worried about the groupwork thing, partially because I hated groupwork in lit classes myself, and partially because some of my students are really hostile to one another. They're juniors and seniors, mostly, and they've been around each other for years. At this point, I feel more like letting them express their competitiveness through class discussion than like watching them eyeball each other in repressed-hostile groupwork.

There's also the possibility of making them do presentations. I've said this before, here, but I really hate undergraduate presentations. They take up valuable classtime, they're never very good even when they're done well, and no one gets the information they need when they need it. Hence the wiki.

Especially when teaching historical literature to undergrads, it seems like the elusive instructor-free model is almost impossible to achieve in class discussions. If I leave them to their own conversational devices, we'll never get around to talking about aesthetic differences between Augustan and Romantic poetry; we'll be too busy talking about which literary characters our ex-boyfriends remind us of.

One thing that has decentered the class a bit is that a few of my students are already experts of a sort on different topics their research has led them to. One woman has taken several classes on the Romantics, and she's been able to ask the class quite complex questions for discussion. Another woman who has been researching the racialized discourse of pre-Dracula vampirism has been able to bring up her research to the class. A few paid really close attention in their Milton class and are able to suggest interesting connections there. The problem is that not many of my other students have done historical thinking of this kind before and are still in "I liked it; it reminded me of me" territory.

I'd love to know what kinds of discussion methods you use. How do you lead (or not lead) the discussion? How do you bring out certain kinds of analytical responses? What preparation do the students have, beyond reading the primary material? How do you deal with off-topic (or even wildly inappropriate) responses? Do you find, as I do, that the more the class is about reading and understanding a particular historical literature, the less ready you are to drop the reins?

A Few Thoughts about Democracy, on this Election Day (from Alan Keenan)

2006-11-07T10:27:00.000-05:00

Since it's Election Day, I thought I'd share this passage with all of you today, as we watch the elections unfold. This is from his article, "Twilight of the Political: A Contribution to the Democratic Critique of Cynicism," from Theory & Event (2) 1 (1998):

Democratic politics is constituted out of a series of tensions, even paradoxes, to which there are no final answers, but at best more or less satisfactory negotiations. The simple demand that the people rule themselves, without any prior definition of who the people are or how they should rule, produces the difficult, often frustrating democratic experience of having to abide by a rule that the community must develop in the very attempt to follow it. Thus the classic debates over direct or representative democracy, over the particular forms of representation, over voting, citizenship or language qualifications, over where and how to draw internal political boundaries; the difficulties that attend to "the people"'s self-construction, and the uncertainties they raise about the legitimacy of any rule in their name, are endless.

[available at Project MUSE at http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v002/2.1keenan.html]

Keenan's book Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford University Press: 2003) contains an interesting reading of Rousseau's temporal paradoxes in the construction of the social contract. It is well worth looking at, though this article is really an offshoot of that discussion. I found Keenan very helpful for my own thinking about cynicism.

One last point: Keenan's description of the temporal problems of decisions and decision-making in democracies, the problem of interminable debate, or deliberation that leads nowhere, seems to be the flip side of the "social imaginaries" described by Charles Taylor and McKeon, as these virtual communities struggle to become visible and to have their opinions registered in the formal political process.

Best wishes,

DM

What is Enlightenment, the Prequel, Or, Crappy Teaching Jobs in the Eighteenth Century

2006-11-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

The other day I was teaching Foucault's What is Enlightenment? to my Intro Lit Studies class, which included one student wearing what I took to be his reserves camo outfit with big leather boots. One research group had just presented on Kant, and, unsurprisingly, they were still puzzled by Kant's counter-intuitive treatment of public and private reason. Kant's example of the army officer who exercises his reason and renders obedience at the same time did not make these distinctions any easier for them to understand.

So I mentioned an anecdote about Kant I have always prized, to talk a little about Foucault's treatment of Enlightenment as an exploration of historical limitations:

From Schneewind et al.'s Introduction to Kant's Lectures on Ethics (Cambridge, 1997):

Kant began to teach at the Albertina University in Konigsberg in 1755, when he was thirty-one years old. He taught there for more than four decades, carrying what seems today an astonishlingly heavy load. Usually he gave four or five courses each semester, meeting classes four or five hours a week. He taught logic, metaphysics, physical geography, anthropology, and many other subjects. (He even taught the rudiments of making fortifications to the officers of the Russian army that occupied Konigsberg in the late 1750s.) (xiii)
. . .

[a little further on, after explaining the careful attention Kant gave to religious worship, control of the passions, cautions about sexual indulgence, and so on, Schneewind observes:]

One is reminded that Kant's audience consisted largely of unsophisticated boys, younger than present-day college students, usually away from their rural homes for the first time, and for the most part ill-educated (xvii).

[Schneewind also mentions that Kant routinely lectured to audiences numbering somewhere between fifty and a hundred, which included not just the students but also tutors, civil servants, military officers, intellectuals like Herder, etc. Here is a little glimpse of his lecture style:]

Until the 1790s, his lectures were reported to be witty, somewhat rambling, full of life and feeling, with scattered references to current events and to books. In his early and middle years, at least, if not toward the end of his life, Kant answered questions and held discussions during the lecture hours. And as we have noted, he did not want his students to spend their class time taking notes. He wanted to teach them "not philosophy, but to philosophize; not thoughts to repeat, but thinking . . . thinking for themselves, investigating for themselves, standing on their own feet" (xix).

Not bad for a statement of one's Teaching Philosophy, eh? And it couldn't be farther from the style of the Critiques.

So, indeed, we talked a little about the historical limitations placed upon Kant, limitations represented by Frederick and those army officers sitting in his lecture-halls. We discussed how Foucault argues that Enlightenment, to be worthy of the name, cannot be restricted to an individual process of self-education and self-care, much less a finite group of historical texts and events, but also represents an ongoing collective process in the present, one which involves an assessment of the past to see what kinds of openings it can suggest for us for in the present, whether for action or reflection.

And these anecdotes of Kant's teaching are one more touchstone I carry around, to discuss the difference that geography makes in our images of Enlightenment.

Best wishes,

DM

KW's Course in Later Eighteenth Century Literature

2006-11-02T20:55:00.000-05:00

[KW, whose comments we've been seeing for some time now, asked me to post the following course description, for a course she'll teach next semester.--DM]

Later Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Northwest Passage to the Intellectual World

The challenge presented by later eighteenth century British literature speaks to our own cultural moment: How do you discern excellence and identify representative works when new media are blurring the boundaries between pop culture and high art? To answer this question as it relates to the literature produced between the 1740s and the 1790s, we will NOT tour a preselected array of greatest hits. Instead, we will map the embattled terrain of late eighteenth-century literature, where the literary elite tried to create and define a national literature at the same time that the growing market for reading matter produced new texts faster than cultural boundaries could evolve to contain them.

With the instructor’s guidance, you and your classmates will determine what aspects of this literary period most warrant your scrutiny, from its preoccupation with pirates to its arguments about slavery, from its explorations of the dark recesses of the human soul to its bawdy sense of humor, from its depictions of the peasant’s hearth to its travels in the outer reaches of British colonialism. No prior knowledge of eighteenth-century literature will be required or presumed.

For the first third of the course, a short course packet of primary readings and recent critical assessments will help you build your skills in reading and comprehending eighteenth-century writing and introduce you to the literary culture of the period. The remaining two-thirds of the syllabus will emerge from your research in the Rare Book Library, full-text online eighteenth-century databases, and the textbooks that have canonized certain authors and texts while neglecting others. Your goal will be to create and master a class anthology of selected readings, which will convey the breadth of this period while addressing the themes that most interest you in greater depth.

By the end of the semester you will be able to read a wide variety of late eighteenth-century texts with comprehension, insight, and enjoyment; you will have a well-grounded critical framework for taking part in the ongoing scholarly debate about how to weave these texts into narratives of British literary development; and you will have first-hand knowledge of how scholarly research creates a teachable order out of the chaos of literary history. An important element of meeting these goals will be determining how your instructor can best guide and evaluate your mastery of the course objectives. You and your classmates will decide whether your learning can best be demonstrated by a series of short interpretive papers, final research projects, exams or some combination thereof.

[KW then asks us:]

Advice? Suggestions? Warnings? Relevant concerns for me: this course (for some reason) always seems to draw a lot of secondary education majors who are eager to connect what they learn to their pre-professional context; I've had success in other C18 courses in getting students excited about the course material by researching and writing about primary texts of their own selection.

The omission of particular readings was deliberate: late C18 names either mean nothing to them or alienate them. Plus: I'm not sure what I want to teach. As I see it now, the only primary texts I will assign will be a number of shortshortshort excerpts, presented in a "Learn to Read Late Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Prose" course reader with lots of tear-out worksheets for paraphrase and imitation exercises, with authors selected not so much for the intrinsic value and teachability of their particular works as for how well I can isolate discrete snippets on which students can practice their ability to disentangle latinate heroic couplets, read and interpret personification, recognize and "fill in" elision, identify appeals to the emotions, and the like.

About secondary sources: until very recently it has been an article of faith with me (one I absorbed in my own undergraduate education) NOT to assign secondary reading to undergraduates, but I have come to see the error of my ways. Which means I don't have much information to go on about which or what kind of articles and book chapters my students would find particularly illuminating and accessible. I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

KW

[Well, any suggestions for KW? And please feel free to swap syllabi or brainstorm upcoming courses on the Long Eighteenth. We're always interested to hear about the forms taken on by the Long Eighteenth, at every institution and at every level of the curriculum--DM]

MH writes to us about her upcoming course on "Classicism and the Enlightenment"

2006-10-31T21:37:00.000-05:00

[MH had trouble posting this, so I'm posting on her behalf--DM]

I'm interested in the thread from Wednesday, October 25, 2006, on "What is Enlightenment (in 10 minutes or less)?" I've tried simply not doing the "historical lecture," like KW suggested in the first comment, until I figured out that most of the students in my classes didn't even know what the "Restoration" part of the course title referred to, let alone the "Revolution of 1688," etc. Then, I realized, that if I didn't teach them those historical contexts, no one would.

Like you, I've learned that storytelling, schematizing, and drawing distinctions both generates insights for students and is one of their favorite aspects of the course. For some reason, it's easier for me to define Romanticism or even the position of women in the eighteenth century than it is to get across the complex concept of Enlightenment. Yet now I find myself in the position of developing a course on "Classicism and the Enlightenment" in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the Humanities major at [Riverbend State], which has forced me to come to terms with my approach to "Enlightenment." Like many of us, I developed meta-contexts for Enlightenment mainly in graduate school. But how do you incorporate theoretical/cultural studies issues (and non-eighteenth-century writers like Kant, Marx, the Frankfurt School, Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu) into an undergraduate course that focuses in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The time period constraints necessitate teaching the "primary texts" of the Enlightenment. This, too, will have its challenges, as teaching philosophical texts always do. And there is a separate Humanities course on Romanticism, so "the sublime," the French Revolution, and enlightenment seem out of bounds, or at best, a marginal focus.

So far, I know three literary texts that I plan to teach: Paradise Lost, Faustus, and Frankenstein. I'm tempted to include a reader, but I don't know of any specific "Enlightenment" ones, other than the excellent "Race and the Enlightenment."

Any ideas?

Job-letters and the job season this year?

2006-10-30T21:30:00.000-05:00

Since I spent the weekend getting out my last few letters, I'm assuming that some of you are also in the process of writing job letters, or are getting ready for the first wave of mail-outs, to coincide with the Nov. 1 deadlines.

Do those writing, or those having letters written, have any advice or experiences they'd be willing to share with the rest of us? Any good guides for those negotiating the job market? Please consider sharing whatever you think would help those on the market this year.

If for some reason you're concerned about preserving your anonymity, feel free to email your titbit to me at dmazella@uh.edu and I'll be happy post on your behalf, with identities concealed.

Better yet, just use any pseudonym you wish in the "name" section in the Comments (how about "Doranthus"? or better yet, "Laboranda"?) along with a valid email address, and you'll be fine.

In any case, good luck to everyone going on the market, or contemplating the market, this year.

Best wishes,

DM

Proposal for a new course: 1771: A Year in the Life of the British Empire

2006-10-28T17:09:00.000-04:00

Since pedagogy is one of our ongoing topics here, I thought people might be interested in the course I just proposed to teach in '07-'08, an advanced senior-level undergrad seminar (enrollment 20) based on my current book project, a literary history of the year 1771, as this was reflected in anglophone writings produced in 5 or 6 major cities of the British empire.

I am pitching the course at the undergrad rather than the grad level because I want to whittle down the very large number of potential readings to a manageable size; I'm hoping that this will help me clarify my own thoughts about the book.

I've also decided that theory per se will be less important than historical contextualization, largely because the majority of my students will not be headed for grad school, and I want to encourage independent research in their contextualization projects, rather than leading them through a host of difficult theoretical texts. I'm also experimenting this time round with biographies, to see what contextual information undergrads can pick up from a few exemplary lives. There are additional pedagogical and institutional dimensions to this course, which revolve around the library and my department's requirements, but I won't go into that right now.

I've left off the Additional Readings section, because I'm still unsure what I want to put in there: Bailyn and Michael Warner, certainly, but some straight political and intellectual history, along with a limited amount of literary criticism. I'd be grateful if others had suggestions about additional secondary or even primary readings.

One final issue I'd like to discuss with others at some point is the future of the author- or genre-oriented course. I feel that much of my research nowadays is really organized around very different problems than "the novel in the 18c" or "Laurence Sterne's contribution to the 18c novel," worthy topics that I was trained to discuss as a graduate student, but which seem less urgent to me now. As a result of this split between my research and teaching, I wanted a course where, for example, the category of "region" was at least as important as "genre," and helped to organize both kinds of scholarly activities. My assumption is that new, or at least different paradigms of knowledge demand different paradigms of teaching, though I find that this is rarely the case, even in elite institutions. We just substitute one form of survey for another, etc. etc.

So, for better or worse, this course represents my attempt to start thinking differently by teaching differently.

Best wishes,

DM

***

1771: A Year in the Life of the British Empire

Course Description: This course is an outgrowth of ongoing research for my current book project, 1771: A Geography of Feeling, which analyzes the diverse genres of Anglophone writing produced during a single year in the British empire. For example, 1771 saw the publication of Smollett’s and Mackenzie’s Humphry Clinker and the Man of Feeling, Johnson’s Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting the Falkland Islands, Percy’s Hermit of Warkworth, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Benezet’s Historical Account of Guinea, and Wheatley’s Elegiac Poem on the Death of Whitefield. My book attempts to answer two questions: first, how might we meaningfully relate these disparate authors, works, and genres to one another; and second, how might we use these relations to understand a distinct historical moment that we label, a little arbitrarily, “1771”?

To translate the book’s ongoing research agenda into a framework suitable for undergraduates, I have designed the course around a series of locations that will ground our semester’s discussions of particular authors and works published in and around the year 1771: these sites will include London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and Jamaica. These four locations will orient our readings in the year 1771 both geographically and historically. Moreover, students will supplement this year’s literary texts and contexts with readings in biographical and autobiographical texts involving such exemplary figures as John Wilkes, Benjamin Franklin, or Olaudah Equiano. Anchoring the class discussion around a particular city and a few closely-examined life stories should enable undergraduates to gain a more detailed and complex understanding of a cultural moment as it was experienced at different sites in the British empire. Nonetheless, I also expect students to go beyond their assigned readings by learning about this era from non-literary sources such as contemporary political pamphlets or newspapers, and by doing their own independent research into the historical background and secondary criticism.

Requirements: Students will be required to write brief 2 response-essays about the course-readings, to become responsible for the cultural and historical contexts of one of the cities covered, which they will develop and present in small research groups, and to develop a final research project (ordinarily, a 12-15 pp. research essay) in consultation with the instructor.

Course Readings and Approximate Schedule:

1. London (4 wks).
Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty.
Samuel Johnson, The False Alarm and Transactions respecting the Falkland Islands
James Boswell, Boswell for the Defense
Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker
Phillis Wheatley, sels. (from Basker, below)

2. Edinburgh (4 wks).
James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling
Encyclopedia Britannica and Millar, Origin of Ranks in Society, sels.
Robert Fergusson and James Macpherson, sels.

3. Jamaica (4 wks).
Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
Richard Cumberland, The West Indian
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative
Vincent Carretta, Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man
James Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, sels.

4. Philadelphia (2 wks).
Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, with an Account of the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, sels.

5. Coda: 1776
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Bernard Bailyn, “1776: A Year of Challenge—A World Transformed.”

Open Thread: Pope's reading?

2006-10-26T22:00:00.000-04:00

In honor of the Philadelphia symposium, I thought I'd open up a new thread on Pope, since it seems that we have at least a few people who are interested in eighteenth-century poetry and Pope. Since Pope is one of those authors that I read but rarely teach, I thought it would be better to canvass people than to go on in my usual way.

So here's my question: I've always been struck by the historical range of the poetry that Pope imitated, and by the equally broad range of contemporary writing he apparently championed (say, Samuel Johnson and Robinson Crusoe). Any thoughts about Pope as a reader of others' poetry? As a critic? As, god forbid, an editor of Shakespeare? And any thoughts about how these varied habits of reading informed what has always seemed to me to be one of the most unified and distinctive styles in 18c poetry?

Best,

DM

Why I'd rather be in Philadelphia: Forum on Alexander Pope, Nov. 17th

2006-10-26T12:44:00.000-04:00

I have no idea whether we have Philadelphia-area Long Eighteenth-folk, but I thought that I'd pass this along, anyway, if only because I saw that Laura Rosenthal will be speaking there. It looks pretty swanky.

DM
***
The University of Pennsylvania Eighteenth Century Reading Group and Department of English invite you to a one-day symposium:

Reading Alexander Pope:

From "fatal Sheers" to "unwilling ears"

Friday, November 17, 2006
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Humanities Forum
University of Pennsylvania
3619 Locust Walk

Schedule:

"The Rape of the Lock" (10 a.m. – 1 p.m.)
Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania
Laura Rosenthal, University of Maryland, College Park
Chi-ming Yang, University of Pennsylvania

"Espistle to Arbuthnot" (2 p.m. – 5 p.m.)
Jack Lynch, Rutgers-Newark, State University of New Jersey
Paula McDowell, Visiting Professor, New York University
John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
Stuart Sherman, Fordham University

A reception in the Rosenwald Gallery on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt Library will follow the second panel. "Gulliver's Reading," an exhibition of the library of Jonathan Swift, will be on display in the Gallery.

For additional information and registration, please visit our symposium website: http://www.english.upenn.edu/Conferences/Pope2006/

--------------------------------------------------------
Satirist, moral philosopher, Horatian imitator, translator of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and self-styled student of the passions, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) established himself as a major British poet by the time he was thirty years old. He is remembered for his epigrammatic wit, his mastery of the couplet form, and his claim to be the first professional poet in Britain —- that is, the first to support himself entirely from the sale of his poetry.

Each panel will discuss Pope's work and career from various viewpoints, not just from the perspective of the eighteenth century as an historical literary field but also within broader critical contexts such as aesthetics, poetics, imperialism, gender, and print culture. The invited speakers will begin by offering brief introductory comments that raise a central question or observation for the other panel members and the audience. A workshop-style discussion will follow. The organization of the day's panels —- early Pope and late Pope —- will enable the group to trace the trajectory of an eighteenth-century poet's career in a manner that invites comparison and juxtaposition.

Sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania's Department of English,
Graduate Student Associations Council, and Eighteenth Century Reading Group.

What is Enlightenment (in 10 minutes or less)?

2006-10-25T09:37:00.000-04:00

There are times when we all have to take a deep breath and explain to our students what "Enlightenment" means. Or "Romanticism." Or, "sensibility." Or, we might have to answer a question like, "What was the position of women in the eighteenth century?" These are the moments when we dig deep into our teaching experience, our accumulated reading, our long-term memory, and even the paltry insights we scatter across every course, and try to impart something bigger, wider, and deeper than, "here is a novel. Let's read it!"

The historical background lecture, I've noticed, is the terror of every graduate student imagining herself as The Expert in front of a restive class. I know I hated doing them, because I felt that I was travestying something I'd spent years trying to figure out on my own. Let them go read a bunch of sermons! Or try to understand Hegel! Or read the remotest, dryest stretches of Dryden's prose! Let's see how well they do, huh?

And my suspicion is that the lectures I gave back then were, to put it mildly, pretty crappy, though of course no one complained, probably because they had no idea what I was talking about. For the inexperienced teacher, opacity is bliss.

When I got to an actual job which demanded that I answer such questions pretty regularly, I took a more pragmatic attitude, and learned that a large part of teaching is the strategic reduction of complexity, simplifying things by storytelling, by schematizing, and by drawing distinctions, all designed to produce certain insights among students. And this is one of the invaluable things that teaching experience gives the teacher with the luxury (and the burden) of returning to the same materials again and again: the ability to zero in on the strategic simplifications that have generated insights among their students over time.

Now, one thing I noticed in Allen's interesting thread on Enlightenment universalism was the fact that many of the respondents were working off of the large-scale paradigms they generated for their own classes. I know that I was. And I'm wondering if we could talk a little about how we develop such meta-contexts, to use an awkward term, for teaching and research, and discuss how these meta-contexts relate to our own and others' scholarship, as these continue to develop over time.

After all, I think we've all had the experience of sittting in the class of a "great lecturer" and realizing that we are listening to insights developed decades earlier, and polished through mere repetition.

So, the intellectual and historical background lecture. How did you develop yours, and how do you continue to develop it in successive courses?

DM

Parker is on board

2006-10-24T10:45:00.000-04:00

Good news! I heard back from Blanford Parker about possible discussion of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson. He writes:

I am moved that anyone might be interested in discussing my book. I would be glad to respond to the discussion in the ways you suggested once I get up to speed on blog and blogging. I always like a chance to clarify my (sometimes unintentionally cryptic) meaning and I have been altering my views slightly on satire and other matters.

I've asked Prof. Parker to give us some possible dates when he'll be available, and I'd like input from you on this as well. When might be a good time to do this? The Triumph is, mercifully, about 250 pages, and quite a good read. I'll be very interested to see how his views have changed between the initial publication in 1998 and the paperback release this summer.

Who wants to play this round?

Plunkett & Macleane (1999): They rob from the rich . . . and just keep it.

2006-10-23T23:32:00.000-04:00

Rebecca: [after her father has asked why she is dancing with Macleane] He doesn't make my flesh crawl.
Macleane: *Thank* you.

Aha, here it is, in all its glory, with all the IMDB info for you Long Eighteenth folk to feast upon:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134033/

The summaries make it sound a lot cheesier than I remembered it. Had no memory at all of Liv Tyler, or her bad accent, or Alan Cummings as a bisexual aristocrat called "Lord Rochester," unaccountably stranded in mid-18th century London. (Maybe he was a ghost! Risen up from the dead!)

What I do remember is the excellence of the soundtrack, which was by Craig Armstrong, and the fact that the aesthetic of Trainspotting was somehow imported into it wholesale, probably by bringing in Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle as the leads, after they were first noticed in Trainspotting.

Directed by Jake Scott, son of Ridley I believe, and whose previous experience was mostly music videos. But I thought the script and acting were matched pretty well with the visuals, which really were spectacular.

OK, any other takers for their favorite 18th century costume drama, crappy or otherwise?

Best,

DM

The Enlightenment and Universal Law

2006-10-22T08:54:00.000-04:00

I just told my class a few weeks ago that the European Enlightenment was characterized by, among many other things, a healthy skepticism for dogmatism, a rejection of blind authority to traditional sources of power and knowledge, an openness to different ideas and opinions from the New World and beyond, and a driving curiosity to explore selfhood and subjectivity (seen best in the 18c novel, via Locke).

But just the other day we were reading Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man," and I heard myself telling the same students that the poem is a representative Enlightenment text for its assertive appeals to Universal Truth and an unchanging "Nature" (human and otherwise) that parallels Newton's "laws" of gravity and physics and the subsequent confidence in the culture at large that God's ways could finally be explained as a function of Reason.

So which is it? Is Pope's poem an Enlightenment text for its foundation in Unchanging Universal Truth, or is it a kind of anti-Enlightenment text for its completely trusting capitulation to an (albeit Reasonable) God and its refusal to acknowledge that different people might have different angles on Truth?

Marie Antoinette (the film)?

2006-10-20T23:50:00.000-04:00

Well, it's Friday night, and I thought maybe we all needed to think very seriously about whether we'll ever watch Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, either in a theater (nope, not this year) or possibly with a rental (perhaps, if we can manage to stay up that late).

It all depends on whether splashy, glossy Hollywoody historical costume dramas set in our period really appeal to you as a know-it-all eighteenth century specialist.

On the one hand, maybe a movie like this means that what we study is really, really popular! It does have Spiderman's girlfriend in it, after all. But maybe this kind of casting is the only way a mass audience could be induced to watch a movie like this.

Here's the question: do you still get chills thinking about the time Madonna did "Vogue" at the Video Music Awards with a Versailles-theme, complete with male dancers in matching wigs and hot pants?

I enjoyed the Madonna version of Marie Antoinette, actually, but I'm not sure that Sofia Coppola has really thought this through, any more than Madonna did when she strapped on that wig and bustle.

This doesn't give me much confidence either:

While some critics have compared Marie Antoinette with modern-day female icons ranging from Paris Hilton to Diana, Princess of Wales, Coppola denies any connection. "I'm not even going to comment on Paris," she says. "As for Princess Diana, I wasn't really thinking of her when I was making the film but in hindsight I can see a connection between her and Marie Antoinette; this young girl put into this royal family without a lot of freedom. I can definitely see similarities in that royal life but I wasn't thinking specifically of her."

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/article1902875.ece

But what do I know? Has anyone seen it? Or intends to see it? Maybe it's fabulous, and I'm just too tired to watch a lavish historical costume drama starring Spiderman's girlfriend.

Best wishes, and happy weekend,

DM

Unteachable Books?

2006-10-19T12:44:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's exchanges with Laura about the Female Quixote made me think about the reasons for the FQ's current popularity as a teaching-text, compared with the other novels of Lennox, which have a much lower profile. There are sometimes good reasons for these kinds of disciminations, but sometimes not: I sometimes wonder why, besides length, Burney's Evelina seems to be taught more often at the undergrad level than a novel like Cecilia, which for my money is a more interesting and mature work. And I doubt that Tristram Shandy is taught much at all in undergrad classes nowadays, for a variety of reasons.

But I don't think Laura would mind (would you Laura?) if I resumed a discussion we had a few ASECS ago about Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. I remember telling Laura about how fascinating the Cadwallader Crabtree episodes were, but how hopeless it would be in any novel course. It's a peculiarly unattractive, lengthy, episodic, violent and unstructured novel, even by Smollett's low standards, though it does have its funny bits. And, indeed, I have happily written about Peregrine, without any expectation that I could use it in a course I could envision teaching.

So, let's hear about your unteachable books. Do you have books that you'd study but never teach? Did you ever discover that one of your lifetime faves was a surprisingly hard sell to your stonefaced students?

Best,

DM

Returning to the Female Quixote

2006-10-17T22:29:00.000-04:00

I just taught the Female Quixote again, after our Richardsonian marathon, and I've learned just how teachable a novel it is, especially in the context of my Haywood to Austen domestic novel course. I had initially taught her very differently, as a kind of weak female echo of both Richardson and Fielding, and found myself wondering, along with the rest of the class, why I'd assigned her.

It was when I started thinking more specifically about the sub-genres constituting the novel, and seeing her as an important literary model for Austen, that the FQ became more interesting to me. When read alongside Burney, Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, and a big chunk of Austen, including the juvenilia, the novel made much better sense to me as a part of literary history. And, really, there is a lightness to the comedy in her writing that I sometimes wish I could find in Burney or Smollett.

In the course of rereading and prepping the novel, though, I noticed two things I hadn't really reflected on before.

The first was just how displaced this Gibraltar-born daughter of a Scots army officer had been in her earliest years: while still a child, she had followed her father to Fort New York, and ended up in London unprovided for, landing in a disagreeable marriage to another Scot, one Alexander Lennox. But the novels that reflected her American experience do not seem to have garnered anywhere near the attention of the FQ. All the exoticism of this novel resides in the fanciful stories that fill poor Arabella's head.

The second thing I noted was how different this book's take on sensibility was from Burney's heroines, largely because Lennox satirizes and idealizes the sentimental female at the same time. The effect actually resembles Sterne's toying with the sentimental in the Sentimental Journey, since we are left unsure how to credit the suffering that undoubtedly does take place in both books.

Initially, Lennox plays Arabella's mourning purely for laughs, as when she imitates her Romance heroines' all-too-eloquent speeches, which makes her matter-of-fact Uncle Charles think she is in a "delirium."

But then Charles and his son, Glanville, go in to see her lying negligently on the bed, and this is what they find:

Her deep Mourning, and the black Gawse, which covered Part of her fair Face, was so advantageous to her Shape and Complexion, that Sir Charles, who had not seen her since she grew up, was struck with an extreme Surprize at her Beauty, while his Son was gazing on her so passionately, that he never thought of introducing his Father to her, who contemplated her with as much Admiration as his Son, though with less Passion (60).

What struck me this time round was how Clarissa-like this scene was, though in ways that Richardson never would have acknowledged: the heroine's physical presence was enough to stupefy every man who gazes upon her, but the sexuality of the two men's fascination with the sentimental, suffering heroine is clearly acknowledged by the omniscient narrator. What permits Lennox to do this is the novel's Quixotic premise, in which the heroine never really understands what those around her are reacting to.

So can others think of similarly comic yet eroticized sensibility in other writings of the Long Eighteenth? What are your favorites?

Best,

DM

Romanticism: A Period or a Sensibility?

2006-10-16T19:46:00.001-04:00

As I finish my dissertation, I've been forced to think more about the way that I categorize the novels upon which I work. They are the radical novels of the 1790s to me--I haven't been particularly anxious to group them in terms of a larger period or movement. However, I've been told twice recently that the novels I'm working on are (no ifs, ands, or buts, it seems) Romantic novels simply because they fall within a certain time frame that I am told is now widely considered the "Romantic period."

I haven't done tons of reading on Romanticism yet--a bit here and there, but no real depth--but this strikes me as strange on the one hand and really unhelpful on the other. I've always understood Romanticism as a set of characteristics of literary works. My primary objection to calling "my" novels Romantic novels is that it classifies them with novels that are so different that it makes the label practically worthless. What does grouping Mary Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Sir Walter Scott's Waverley together under the rubric of "the Romantic novel" tell you about what a Romantic novel is? What does it tell you about either of the novels? What does Romantic mean in this sense?

Obviously we do this kind of broad grouping all the time--what does it mean to call novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Matthew Lewis' The Monk eighteenth-century novels?--but such grouping under the term "Romantic" seems to me different. Does anyone else have thoughts about the "periodization" of Romanticism? Is this so widely accepted now that no one thinks twice about it?

Housekeeping #2

2006-10-14T12:42:00.000-04:00

For those keeping score, here are the recent traffic statistics. Obviously, the collaborative reading generated a great deal of traffic. Click on the graphic to enlarge it.

The reading included posts by five of our contributors and responses by Professor McKeon. I have added links to these posts, in chronological order, in the sidebar for easy access. Everyone should feel free to continue contributing comments to these posts, which will remain "live" due to the sidebar links.

If anyone has any ideas for future group readings or for further development of the blog, please don't hesitate to email.

The Difference that Geography Makes

2006-10-14T10:59:00.000-04:00

Greetings, all. I'm blogging today from Shady Side, MD, visiting my folks this weekend. And no, the grading's not done. That's what the airplane ride is for, isn't it?

Our recent exchanges about historical change and method have really brought home to me two assumptions that I'd like to explore a bit further:

1) that the contingent events that occur in our daily experience will turn up in our interpretation and teaching of the long eighteenth. The best recent example is the new salience of secrecy and scandal in the wake of the page scandals in D.C. Carrie Hintz talked about this dynamic in regards to all the Lewinskiana dating back to the Clinton era, but I think we can argue that this is a more general working assumption that turns up in a lot of our teaching, and now in scholarly blogs like this one. In other words, the historicity of the historian affects her perceptions of the past in substantial though contingent ways. Am I correct when I say that we take this for granted?

2) that we take the geographical difference between "center" and "periphery" as seriously in the present as we do in the past. The Edinburgh reader of the Man of Feeling has a different sense of it as a cultural and historical event than the London reader, because the book's publication inserts itself into distinct histories. As one of my colleagues phrases it, London and Edinburgh exist in distinct geopolitical, and therefore geohistorical, locations, to say nothing of further-flung publics of metropolitan literary culture. Again, is it fair to say that we share this assumption?

Some time ago, I did a little teaching presentation at ASECS called "When did the Enlightenment Reach Texas? (please give dates)," and, of course, I was only partly joking about the question.

One of my first lessons in geohistorical location was the experience of teaching texts like Crusoe to students with stoutly maintained religious identities (mostly evangelical Protestant, but some Catholic). In my first semester in Houston, I was shocked to receive questions on topics like calvinism and predestination, which had been treated as fairly recondite matters by my East coast grad program. This means that even as we treat the Long Eighteenth as a body of material that we are attempting to "reproduce" mimetically from one generation to the next, that nonetheless this process of reproduction will play out quite differently in different places.

If the assumptions I've just outlined are correct, that means that the Long Eighteenth as it is known in Shady Side, MD (only a short drive from the pleasant little eighteenth-century houses and streets of Annapolis), will be different than the Long Eighteenth as it is talked and written about in Philadelphia, New York, or Santa Barbara, not to mention London, Manchester, and Dublin. It's a dizzying prospect, and I'm not sure where it ends.

So how does your location (in every sense of the word) affect your sense of what you study and teach?

Best,

DM

Announcements for those in the New York area

2006-10-12T14:03:00.000-04:00

Next Friday, October 20th at 2pm, Prof. David Kazanjian of the University of Pennsylvania will be giving a talk entitled "'When they come here they feal so free': Liberia and the Equivocal Freedom of Return" at the City University of New York Graduate Center. This event will be held in the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room, where I work, which is C196.05 on the lower level of the Mina Rees Library. To reserve a seat (and refreshments!), please email me at carrieshanafelt@gmail.com.

For those teaching in the CUNY system, please encourage your undergraduate and masters students to enter the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room Essay Competition. Three prizes are awarded in amounts of $500, $300, and $200. We encourage students of all disciplines to enter. The full entry requirements are here.

Lastly, I'd like to bring your attention to the presence of my name on this year's MLA ballot. I am #109, running for a New York State regional delegate position, and I humbly request the favor of your vote. The information about all candidates is at the MLA website here, but you must be logged in to view it.

Please contact me if you're curious about any of these matters.

Mamas, don't let your kids grow up to be authors

2006-10-11T23:19:00.000-04:00

I'm still grading, but while I work, why don't you all take a look at the Gawker.com "Unsolicited" column, which is written by an anonymous editor who has some entertainingly bitchy advice for all you wannabe authors out there who don't treat yer editors right:

http://www.gawker.com/news/unsolicited/unsolicited-some-gentle-advice

I read this, and in a fit of insecurity immediately forwarded it to my editor. Apparently it reminded her of someone else, so I felt relieved. At least she replies to my emails.

Best,

DM

Teaching the Long Eighteenth: Undergrad Research?

2006-10-10T17:45:00.000-04:00

Like the guy in the joke who wakes up to find his underwear lined with $100 bills, I woke up this morning and realized that I had some student papers to attend to. I just got a batch of grad response essays on Richardson, Haywood, or Davys, and I've had a batch of annotated Swift bibliographies that are demanding immediate attention. It seems that all this happened while I was, uh, reading Michael McKeon's posts and responding to them. So now it's time to hunker down and do some grading.

But just in case others would like to procastinate with me, and want to help me postpone my date with the grading-pile just a little longer, I'd like to see how others' classes are going, and I'm particularly interested in what kinds of expectations we bring to undergrad research in our sophomore, junior, and senior courses. What kinds of research can we demand of students still struggling to master their writing, or their research skills, or the standard texts in our period? What distinguishes a really good student project from a mediocre one? How do you encourage your worthy but dull students to develop more interesting projects?

Best,

DM

Research Fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

2006-10-10T11:41:00.000-04:00

[x-posted from Kevin Berland C18-L]

The Lewis Walpole Library will reopen its doors to readers in summer
2007 after eighteen months of extensive building renovation. The new
spaces will include a splendid reading room, state-of-the-art collection
storage, and new staff and conservation workspace. The Library’s
fellowship programs will resume then as well, and applications are
invited for the 2007-2008 year (July through June).

The Library, a department of the Yale University Library located in
Farmington, Connecticut, forty miles from New Haven, has significant
holdings of eighteenth-century prints, drawings, manuscripts, books, and
paintings. Fellows in residence also have access to additional
materials at Yale, including those at the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library and the Yale Center for British Art.

The Library offers visiting fellowships, normally for four weeks, as
well as travel grants of lesser duration, to scholars engaged in
post-doctoral or equivalent research and to doctoral candidates at the
dissertation stage. In a typical year the Library awards up to a dozen
fellowships and travel grants.

The visiting fellowships, which include the cost of travel to and from
Farmington, provide a stipend of $1,800 per month in addition to
accommodation in an eighteenth-century house on site. The travel
grants, which vary in duration and amount, also include accommodation.
Additional information about the library, its collections, facilities,
and programs, may be found at http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole/.

To apply for a fellowship or travel grant, candidates should send a
curriculum vitae, including educational background, professional
experience and publications, and a brief outline of the research
proposal (not to exceed three pages) to: The Librarian, The Lewis
Walpole Library, 154 Main Street, Farmington, CT 06032, USA. FAX (860)
677-6369. Two confidential letters of recommendation are also required
by the application deadline, which is January 12, 2007. Awards will be
announced in March.

Additional information may be obtained by email: walpole@yale.edu.

Michael McKeon says Goodbye to the Long Eighteenth

2006-10-09T23:09:00.000-04:00

[Here's Michael's final statement--DM]

Now that the "collective reading" of The Secret History of Domesticity is over I'd like to thank both participants and silent readers for their interest--of the former, especially Dave, Carrie S., and Laura, who've given me a great deal to ponder. It's a unique experience, at least for me--a running "review" that's really more like a virtual workshop held on the occasion of a recently published book.

I hope the discussion has generated interest in the book that will outlive the occasion. And I'd welcome and respond to (michael.mckeon@rutgers.edu) any thoughts that didn't get aired in the past few days. I'm new to blogging (and had some technical difficulties here, as Dave in his patience can testify), and I see what a remarkable difference it can make in helping subcultures like our own to cohere. Thanks again to everyone involved. Now go out and buy the paperback!

Michael

18th-century Store Discovered Near Fort Edward, N.Y.

2006-10-09T10:44:00.001-04:00

Carrie's post yesterday about the historical significance of Lewis & Clark was still rattling around in my head when I saw the following headline:

ARCHEOLOGISTS FIND 18TH-CENTURY STORE

FORT EDWARD, N.Y. - This history-rich Hudson River community has yielded a museum's worth of 18th-century military artifacts over the decades, from musket balls to human skeletons. But a colonial soldier's daily lot wasn't all fighting and bloodshed. They had their share of down time, and that's where the sutler came in, offering for sale two of the few diversions from frontier duty: alcohol and tobacco.

A five-year-long archaeological project has unearthed the 250-year-old site of a merchant's establishment that sold wine, rum, tobacco and other goods to the thousands of soldiers who passed through this region during the French and Indian War, when Fort Edward was the largest British military post in North America.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061008/ap_on_sc/apn_colonial_convenience_store;_ylt=Ah9sviN8qqi6PZaI4JwKW4us0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MzV0MTdmBHNlYwM3NTM-

This little news item might offer a few angles on the problem Carrie raises, regarding the general ignorance and/or incuriosity of the public about our period.

Lewis & Clark, as far as I can tell from Plotz's dismissals, only became interesting because of their availability as narrative: they could easily fit into paradigms of exploration and conquest that were getting increasingly popular in the early '60s (remember the Daniel Boone show from those days?), even if they weren't really responsible for any particular event or significance beyond the fact of their travels. Plotz wants to demystify them as Great Men, and wants to demystify their travels as an event of national importance.

What this news item describes, however, is a much more typical kind of historical investigation nowadays: a site is discovered, but the names of those who smoked tobacco and drank in the little store/tavern attached to Fort Edwards will never be known, and no Great Man of my acquaintance ever traveled through there. And yet knowing something of the trade routes, the commodities bought and sold there (where did they come from, I wonder?), the military maneuvers, would give us a great deal of information about this region. But this kind of investigation will not give us a narrative as memorable as "The Lewis and Clark Expedition," until some canny historian provides it.

Academic historians have until very recently taken a very anti-narrative turn, leaving earlier forms of historical story-telling to people like Ambrose, who takes a well-deserved shot in Plotz's piece. But perhaps it is possible for historians (and literary scholars) to return to the story-telling function, without all the mythologizing, in the manner of Ginzburg or Natalie Zemon Davis, or perhaps even Simon Schama's recent books. Then we might all know as much about the soldiers of Fort Edwards as we do about Lewis and Clark.

DM

Michael McKeon Gets the Last Word, Tomorrow!

2006-10-08T18:58:00.000-04:00

Michael has just informed me that he will be able to offer us his closing comments tomorrow. That will mark the end of our first Collective Reading, which I think has worked out very well. We eagerly anticipate his final remarks.

In the meantime, we'll entertain whatever new topics that our contributors offer up.

Thanks, and best wishes,

Dave Mazella

McKeon on the Difference between Post-Structuralist and Marxist Attitudes towards the Hermeneutic Circle

2006-10-08T18:47:00.000-04:00

[Once again, half of Michael's posted comments in our exchange were consumed by cyber-gremlins today, so I have reunited them and put them up here for easier reading--DM]

Dave,

Although I can see there may be some basic disagreements between us about historical method, I'll first try to be clearer about what my method aims to do.

By the distinction between seeing the past in its own terms and seeing it in terms other than its own I mean something simpler--more methodological or structural and less epistemologically-"truth" oriented--than you take me to mean. For me the distinction doesn't entail opposing determinate contents--the initial categories are epistemologically-speaking arbitrary--but is rather the engine that sets in motion the process of understanding by which the discovery of determinate contents will be achieved. That motion is dialectical in the sense that the nature of the "internal" and "external" viewpoints it works with is defined by an interaction, like that between particular facts or bits of evidence and a general hypothesis, whereby the two enter into a back-and-forth process of reciprocal revision until a point is reached at which what seems a satisfactory correspondence between the two has been found--i.e., at which the hypothesis seems adequately responsive to the data and the data seem adequately contained by the hypothesis.

This isn't to "idealize" the act of historical understanding but to acknowledge its possibility, and to suggest a "realistic" way of going about it. By the criteria of the "satisfactory" and the "adequate" I mean the sorts of probabilistic standards that govern empirical analysis, although the "rules of evidence" that apply in this sort of study are more like those that operate in a court of law than like those involved in scientific method. The problem I have with poststructuralism in this regard is that the absoluteness of its epistemological skepticism, at least on paper, makes this kind of judgment impossible. If the choice is between either the accessibility or the inaccessibility of the past, the choice becomes a dichotomous opposition between absolutes for neither of which methodological decisions about the adequacy of evidence to a particular hypothesis have any interest. This is the choice between the positivism of "a privileged access to the past" and "some fixed point of historical truth" on the one hand and the relativism or aestheticism of "valuable insights" on the other. If the value of insights is assessed rhetorically, i.e., by the degree to which they speak to or satisfy the needs or expectations of a contemporary audience, there's no way of judging between the value of insights that, relatively speaking, are equally attuned to their respective publics. (Nor, to return to the defense of a "master narrative," is there any middle ground where the epistemological value of taking into account a little evidence or a lot, or of doing it "well" or "badly," might be assessed.)

If these were really the principles on which literary critics and historians operated, their investment in either activity would seem inexplicable. I include criticism here because I think reading a text is liable to the same sorts of epistemological caveats as is "reading" the past. Adducing a text's "own" terms is no less problematic than adducing those of the past, yet the ambition to do this probabilistically--"privileged" not a priori but by virtue of the way one construes the meaning(s) of a text on the evidentiary basis of the language in which it's written--is one we're happy to shoulder, as teachers and writers, on a daily basis.

As I understand it, the difference between poststructuralist and Marxist method, at least on the theoretical level, can be expressed as the difference between two distinct attitudes toward the hermeneutic circle. To analyze the nature of the parts on the basis of our knowledge of the whole presupposes a knowledge of the parts as that which gives the whole its wholeness; to begin at the level of the parts presupposes a knowledge of the whole on the basis of which their partial nature is predicated. For poststructuralist theory, this is a contradiction that precludes knowledge. For Marxist theory it's a contradiction--between parts and whole, between own terms and other terms, between interpretation and explanation--that inaugurates the process of coming to knowledge.

Michael McKeon

Why Lewis and Clark Matter

2006-10-08T15:12:00.000-04:00

I don't mean to interrupt the wonderful conversation here about British print culture and McKeon, but I did want to respond to this Slate article condemning the current interest in Lewis and Clark.

David Plotz is absolutely right to say that Lewis and Clark's travels are mythologized, wrongly, as a narrative of the great American expansion project. Anyone who has read the journals has felt the deep sense of dread and unmitigated failure. (As my friend Brooks Hefner is fond of saying, "All early American narratives are about unmitigated failure.") But why is that a reason to turn away from them?

As Jim Chevallier mentioned in his first post here, there is an exhilarating pleasure to be had in examining the early modern, that of "tugging at Santa Claus' beard to see if it is real." I fear that while conservative mythologies of the Founding Fathers and expansion narratives seek to canonize these narratives for the purpose of erasing the failures of the birth of the Republic, the response of those who resist the mythologies is to forget them altogether.

As a scholar, I've been increasingly drawn to Lewis and Clark, Franklin, and Jefferson, because to read them is to find those mythologies erased before your eyes. Tugging at the beard of the early Republic reveals a very human and conflicted face. As much as Jefferson is celebrated as a historical figure, reading Notes on the State of Virginia uncovers the conflicts between his devotion to American freedom and his racism, between his desire for expansion and his deeply troubled view of the Indian nations.

Shouldn't the United States be looking at these narratives for what they are? Is it not important for us to know our history of failure and internal ideological conflict? I am shocked by how few Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, have actually read the words of the people they idolize or attack in the name of current political argument. Is it that we are afraid to find that those who constructed our nation were, like all human beings, great and terrible at once, and that this is our legacy?

The Long Eighteenth says Good-bye to the Secret History

2006-10-08T13:42:00.000-04:00

As you'll see, I'm letting Michael McKeon have the final word (see above).

Nonetheless, I'd like to personally thank everyone involved with this first Collective Reading: Carrie Shanafelt, who made this blog possible with her time and energy, and who kicked off discussion with the first post; Tita Chico, Carrie Hintz, and Laura Rosenthal, and most of all Michael McKeon, who submitted himself and his book to a grueling, week-long process of cyber-questioning, despite technical glitches and truncated posts. I do hope that all of you continue to check in with us from time to time. The Long Eighteenth will always welcome your suggestions and contributions. Please stay in touch.

Some of my students have told me they were following our exchanges, and I'm hoping that those who listened in on the discussion will soon start posting their own comments, observations, and queries on everything "Long Eighteenth." As you can see from last week's discussion, we do not bite (even while debating method).

Please let us know your ideas for the next collective reading, either in terms of books or other kinds of events. If you or your friends want to propose some new type of event, maybe a forum on a particular topic, or something entirely new, please post it to the list or contact me offlist at dmazella@uh.edu. We're also eager to hear any suggestions you might have about improving the format of our Collective Readings.

Michael Warner once remarked that a modern "public" is by definition an address to strangers, an address to a group of people that cannot be known in advance. A public is "more than a list of one's friends," but is instead a group of strangers who come together into a "public" by virtue of their participation (74). I have been very happy to find the names of some old friends on this blog; but I am also pleased to find here some scholars whose work I look forward to learning about in the future. Thanks to all of you for helping us come together around this book.

Best wishes,

David Mazella

A Tale of Two Michaels: McKeon and Warner on the Virtuality of the Public

2006-10-08T11:24:00.000-04:00

Since this is the final day of discussion, I wanted to make sure we responded to at least one of Michael's questions, so I decided to focus on the Secret History's relation to another book that I've been thinking about quite a bit over the past year: Michael Warner's Public and Counterpublic (Zone, 2002). As I was reading Michael's book, I found myself thinking a lot about Warner's, and, sure enough, I saw Warner's book acknowledged at some key points of discussion.

As Carrie Shanafelt pointed out on the first day of discussion, "the special thing about the conceptualization of public discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that, suddenly, it becomes one of the main explicit concerns of writers and other public figures." After quoting McKeon's reference to Charles Taylor and the "social imaginary" on p. 107, she gives an excellent description of how this social imaginary coalesced:

As any of us working in the long eighteenth century are aware, almost every author of the period has passages explicitly describing, defending, and even performatively constructing a particular relationship between the public and the private selves of the author, or even between the private and public selves of the reader. The text itself self-consciously serves as a mediator between those selves, both creating a public community for discourse through the publicity of publication and offering a subject for private contemplation.

Carrie has noted the important organizing effect of texts in these virtual spaces of community and solitude, an organizing effect that McKeon has characteristically aligned with two other effects of modernity: the emergent division of knowledge that likewise organizes generals and particulars, as well as the modern marketplace, which "conceives value to be a general and homogeneous category available through the equalization of particular and distinct commodities" (106).

Though Warner is not making a historical argument in the manner of McKeon, McKeon's point about the role of the marketplace as a model for the new, virtual social and communicative relations of modernity adds an important, causal piece of the Big Picture (as Laura would call it) that Warner discusses chiefly in contemporary contexts. McKeon goes on to relate these features of epistemological "disembedding" to the characteristic features of modernity:

These basic features of features of the modern social imaginary--virtuality, self-constitution, reflexivity, --are germane to the fundamental quality of modern socioeconomic and cultural relations, the fact that they are relatively disembodied, mediated rather than face to face, disembedded from the substratum of physical presence and practice. Although in differing ways, modern social relations--the social contract, market exchange, public opinion--are normatively impersonal relations between "strangers" that who have no actual experience of one another (107).

For this statement, McKeon cites a number of sources, including Warner's book, which includes this interesting passage:

The expansive force of these [modern] cultural forms [nation or public or market] cannot be understood apart from the way they make stranger relationality normative, reshaping the most intimate dimensions of subjectivity around co-membership, with indefinite persons in a context of routine action. The development of forms that mediate the intimate theater of stranger relationality must surely be one of the most significant dimensions of modern history, though the story of this transformation in the meaning of strangers has been told only in fragments. It is hard to imagine such abstract modes of being as rights-bearing personhood, species being, and sexuality, for example, without forms that give concrete shape to the interactivity of those who have no idea with whom they interact (76).

What we owe to McKeon, and what I am grateful to Laura for pointing out as well, is the recognition of how much these modern cultural forms of epistemological "disembedding" and virtual, "disembodied" interactions owe to the emergence of the modern marketplace, as an engine of historical change, as an epistemological model, but also as a model of social relations. And one of the key places where we see this virtuality elaborated is in the distinction between actual and concrete particularity, and the emergent doctrines of realism and the aesthetic (109).

DM

Dave's response to McKeon

2006-10-07T23:26:00.000-04:00

Michael and I probably agree more than we disagree about these issues of interpretation, but I'll outline some of the areas of agreement, indicate the main points where we diverge, then get out of the way of discussion.

I should say straight off that the previous post is a very full and useful guide to Michael's thoughts about historical method, which help a great deal to illuminate the decisions he made in structuring the book and approaching his topic.

Now here are the areas of agreement:

1. I am fine with treating interpretation and explanation as a doublet, both of whose terms represent phases in a process equally necessary for the proper understanding of the past.

2. I also appreciate your concern for beginning with the intentions of historical actors, then fully exploring the social contexts of their actions within those socio-historical settings. Frankly, I don't know any other way to proceed with historical inquiries.

3. I also understand your caution about reading subsequent historical events (i.e., the "failure of Enlightenment") backward into the actions and consciousness of those historical actors who had no clue about how those historical events were going to work out.

4. Your whole paragraph on modernity and its failures is really admirable, and explains why we need to remind ourselves and our students what modernity looked like before it was tried out.

Now, here are the disagreements:

5. Having said that, because I hold what you call the poststructuralist belief in the epistemological inaccessibility of the past, I do believe that historicists and presentists both reconstruct the past more or less adequately (or persuasively) in the present; no one can claim a privileged access to the past, no matter what terms they use, or how well they use them.

6. My biggest problem with the notion of "seeing the past in its own terms" is not simply with the question of "whose past [meaning which people in the past should be described]," but also the problem of "whose terms," meaning whose scholarly interpretations should be preferred, and why.

As you noted, this problem does indeed beg a number of questions: should "the past" be understood in only one set of terms, which we could recognize to be the past's own terms? How would we which of all the different ways to describe the past are not just true statements, but the past's own terms? Whose authority decides? In a few instances, we might have direct evidence from contemporary accounts, but otherwise we are relying upon traditions of interpretations/explanations that have accompanied these texts into the present, and then using that tradition as a corrective to our own obsessions and desires concerning these topics.

In other words, I suppose I am stressing the fact that historicist interpretation is not just an individual, synchronic act, but a collective process repeated over and over again on a diachronic axis, rather like your brilliant account of Johnson's "quantitative" analysis of Shakespeare.

This is one reason why I am less worried about anachronism, since I believe that successive historians are not advancing away from, or towards, some fixed point of historical truth, but are instead attempting to generate valuable insights into their materials that will speak to contemporary (scholarly) audiences. I do take it for granted that the nature of these insights will change over time.

If we think about the historical accumulation of interpretations of the past, we would see really staggering variations in critics and epochs' views of the past's "own terms" over time. These wildly divergent views tend to get institutionalized and naturalized, however, into a rather tidy and academic version of the "past in its own terms" that may in fact have little to do with what people in the past may have actually, concretely believed. The views of most 18c readers of an 18c author are certainly "partial" in comparison with what we as scholars take years to internalize.

My Swift students are still shocked to hear that a critic as good as Samuel Johnson could doubt the attribution of a Tale of a Tub, or that the rumors of Swift's secret marriages or insanity had such a dramatic effect on even the most considered views of him in the 18th and 19th century. These were matters of debate and controversy in the past: whose view, then, counts as that of the past's? Thackeray's Swift? Orrery's? Sheridan's? Ehrenphreis's? Do we really believe that these writers use the same set of terms to understand a figure as complex as Swift?

So I appreciate all the cautions that you have given us about projecting our present-day concerns too freely upon the past, but I in turn would caution against over-idealizing the act of historical understanding. Instead, I would call attention to the scrappiness and persistent controversy of actual historical writing in the period under question.

Is it possible that a pragmatic or "rhetorical" orientation toward the past is closer to the actual views of the past held by history-writers between Camden and Gibbon, rather than the more elevated views held by Meinecke or Dilthey? If so, what should this disparity tell us?

Best wishes,

DM

McKeon Responds to Dave and Laura on Presentism (from Comments)

2006-10-07T18:36:00.000-04:00

[Since this response ran through three consecutive Comment posts, I thought it would be easier to read, follow, and respond to if I pasted it into a single new post. Laura, if you'd like, perhaps you could respond here? And, please, if others are interested, join us--DM]

Dave and Laura,

I agree entirely that "interpretation" and "explanation" form a dialectical doublet, in their interrelation defining what historical method should aim to achieve. I emphasize the former only because I feel as though "our" attentiveness to the self-conceptions of the past in recent years has been overbalanced by methods and perspectives that derive from modern experience. By this I meant something very imprecise, and the term "presentist" is probably misleading except in so far as it, too, means simply "what postdates the portion of the past that's under study." I think "explanation" is crucial to historical study, but perhaps only once (a schematic temporalization) "interpretation" has defined a sense of the past's self-understanding on the basis of which the claim to "explain" by *other* means can become intelligible.

So in these terms, the presentism I sought to rebalance in Secret History is the tendency to read the period in which modernity first seems to emerge (which I take at least to include the 18th century) from the viewpoint of the failures of modernity, paradigmatically, capitalism, the bourgeoisie, class conflict, liberalism, the public sphere, separate spheres, "The Enlightenment." To study these things from the viewpoint of "the past" is, as I've already quoted, "to view the past not only as the prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past" (xxvii), a formulation that suggests that the distinction between interp. and explan. can also name the difference between attending to the intentional *motives* with which past activities, etc. were undertaken and elaborating a theoretical or *causal* understanding whose possibility depends on taking a certain distance from the aims of the past culture in question. In 1690 capitalism meant not commodity fetishism, alienated labor, and the extraction of surplus labor but freedom from hierarchical political and economic control. The bourgeoisie was not a self-conscious class whose ideology sought to universalize its own interests. Indeed, whether it even existed is a definitional rather than an empirical question--hence my objection (74) to the translation of Habermas's burgerlich as bourgeois rather than civil. What people *experienced* in 1690 was not class conflict but a conflict between status-based assumptions about the coextension of birth and worth and emergent class-based assumptions that worth was a function of labor discipline within one's calling, or simply one's industrious accomplishments and the upward mobility that attended them.

Except for a few thoughtful "Tory feminists," "liberalism" wasn't an ideology of human rights and negative freedom that nonetheless silently drew the line at women and indigent men but a revolutionary alternative to the tacit belief in monarchal legitimacy. Similarly, the public sphere wasn't a hypocritical claim to inclusiveness and equality but a revolutionary intuition that the determination of public affairs should be the work of others besides the king and his ministers. Separate spheres was not simply the modern, more ruthlessly efficient instantiation of patriarchal inequality but one result of reconceiving gender relations no longer as a matter of better vs. worse but instead as a matter of equality in difference. And the Enlightenment was not the dogmatic adherence to rational and instrumental "objectivity" but a dialectical effort to make sense of the difference between the object and the subject, science and the humanities that had been bequeathed by the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. This is not to fashion an apology for modernity but to fill in its other side (as it seems these days necessary to do) so as to come closer to an understanding of the past as, like the present, historical process.This sort of presentism can't be laid at the door of any single recent critical movement: the post-structuralist demystification of "history," utopian Marxist contempt for the achievements of modernization, new historicist efforts to "do" history outside the protocols of empiricism--i.e., without abandoning the poststructuralist belief that "history" is epistemologically inaccessible--all these have contributed to the haze of "negative hermeneutics" (Ricoeur) of our times. To recur to one of your points, Dave, although I see what you mean about the comparable vulnerability of "presentism" and "historicism" to partiality, I'd rather reorient these terms, partly on the precedent of previous usage. I take presentism itself to be a mode of "historicism" in the now very general sense of historicism as entailing any commitment to historical understanding. But as I see it, "historicism" came into usage to name what I've been calling "interpretation," the aim to study the past in its own terms, as opposed to the aim to elaborate general laws of historical formation and development that can "explain" history in a more trans-historical fashion, i.e., the attempt to apply the model of scientific "natural laws" to sociohistorical experience.(I associate this meaning of historicism with, e.g., Troeltsch and Dilthey; but ironically Popper and others later adopted the term to describe and discredit what I'm calling "explanation".)

And I agree that to conceive interpretation as the study of the past in its own terms begs the question of what, or even more *whose*, past we're talking about. Thinking of inter./explan. as methodologically a dialectical doublet, however, suggests that this is the necessary next step in interpretation: dividing interpretation--a whole vis a vis its opposition to explanation--into its own parts once that preceding division has been accomplished. This can be both diachronic and synchronic: the former in so far as "the past" we seek to understand is a chronology that needs diachronic subdivision if we're to sort out different viewpoints and perspectives; certainly the latter once we recognize that any diachronic period is defined apart from others according to a synchronic perception of what makes it, as a unit, different from surrounding periods. I.e., synchronic study isn't the opposite of diachronic study, it presupposes it as the means by which any slice of diachrony becomes susceptible, by bracketing adjacent chronologies, to synchronic understanding. In this respect I don't think cultural studies devotes itself to synchronic rather than diachronic study; it brackets the problem of diachrony--and thereby takes a position on diachrony--by conceiving a period (or a decade or a day) as susceptible to its "own" analysis. And I think we owe synchronic study not to any recent thinking but to the Scottish Enlightenment historians and then, soon after, to the full elaboration of Marx, for whom the synchronic relationship between infrastructure and superstructure became as indispensable to "historical" study as is the relationship between one event or period and others. (The attribution of the discovery of synchrony to cultural studies might even be seen as an example of "presentism," like the case of looking to Said [as Dave points out]for the origins of what Selden already practiced.) And I think that when people castigate "master narratives" they're not thinking of diachronic totalizations alone. The strong meaning of "teleology" as positing "at the outset a result purported to emerge only as the result of inquiry" (xxv) doesn't require a linear narrative in which to operate. After all, Marx's synchronic relation of ideology/material base has been accused (although I think wrongly)of teleology, as well as of "abstraction" and "reduction." On the other hand, the ambition to hunt out teleology has led some to conflate teleology with linear succession or temporality, which seems to me a mistake. (If this were true, then chronological readings would be ipso facto "evolutionary" readings, whereas in fact they also can be, and can be criticized as, "devolutionary.")For a discussion of interp./explan. that very interestingly argues the subtlety with which that distinction can be made when applied to micro-questions of whether individual actions are the result of "internal" motive or "external" cause see Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame, 1984), 211-29.

Michael McKeon

What does it Mean to Understand the Past in its Own Terms?

2006-10-07T07:36:00.000-04:00

I was really struck by this passage of Michael's about his critical and historical method, because it articulated an area where Michael and I probably disagree in theory, though perhaps not so much in practice:

But to characterize my method I think I need to have recourse to readings in historiography and historical method, especially the distinction between interpretation and explanation--to simplify, the difference between understanding the past in its own terms and understanding it in terms not available to it.

Now, Michael immediately qualifies this distinction between the "presentist" and what I'd call the historicist positions, by saying that we need to pursue both. Nonetheless, he does stake out a position that "presentist" studies have dominated theory and criticism for quite some time, and seems to suggest that such a historicism could act as a corrective to presentism. And this seems a worthy point: any critical method, pursued without sufficient awareness of its limits, can generate mechanical and unpersuasive results. This seems as true of "presentism" as it does of the most scrupulous historicism.

But if Michael's dialectical method has any validity (which I think it does), the position of the careful "historicist" is going to be as conditioned by the present as the most rampant presentist, who is nonetheless going to be determined by his own historical situatedness. In other words, both sides will have constructed their notions of past AND present in a present that impinges upon them in various ways, and in response to their perceptions to the past. In other words, I don't see any automatic advantage on either side, though both are obliged to be as scrupulous as possible in their reconstructions of both past and present.

Let me give a few examples from our own discussion: Carrie Hintz made some interesting points about secrecy in our recent political past, with her references to the Lewinsky scandal. And even as our little discussion has unfolded, a very lurid sex scandal (phone sex! on the floor of the House! whoops, not true!) has overtaken political argument in this country. Even as we discuss scandals like the warming-pan baby, the notion of "scandal" takes on a new saliency in both the present and in our reconstructions of the past, because of events none of us foresaw a few weeks ago (I hope). I'd argue that both historical interpretation and explanation use metaphors for us to render the past intelligible, and that these metaphors are as likely to come from present-day scandals as they are from past ones, for example.

In your own explanation of the traditional/modern divide, Michael, you had recourse to Chinua Achebe and his presentation of perceptions of tradition in a non-Western context. These are obviously things that chronologically and conceptually were unavailable to John Selden, though Selden had an admirable interest in "Oriental" languages and cultures. But talking about Selden's interest in such things indeed seemed charming and "antiquarian" until critics began to think more critically about the West's discursive constructions of "non-Western" or "traditional" cultures in pre-20th century writers. Though sustained critical interest in such topics was only generated, say, after Said, I don't think it's fair to claim that pursuing those questions is purely presentist, since these parts of Selden's scholarship have been known about for some time, though they were known as part of his philological work on biblical languages. But is calling it "biblical" any less mediated or presentist than calling it "orientalist"? As you acknowledge, we need both kinds of approaches, and use them both together, all the time.

There are other issues here, as well, like the dangers of hypostasizing "the past" so that only a particular set of terms can be defined as "its own." The virtue of the dialectical method, I think, is to put us on guard against believing that any particular set of terms could be considered self-sufficient or adequate for such explanations. Does the resident of Edinburgh in 1704 inhabit the "same" present or past as the resident of London in the same year? Does the illiterate laborer digging up Roman ruins for the local clergyman's researches share his sense of antiquity? Etc. etc.

So I appreciate your notion that we must be careful about introducing anachronisms into our analyses, but I believe that a historicist may be in as much danger of doing so as a presentist.

Best,

DM

Michael McKeon Responds, part II (Questions for us)

2006-10-06T21:01:00.000-04:00

[this is the second part of the email that Michael sent me--DM]

TOPICS OF SPECIAL INTEREST

In order to take full advantage of this remarkable opportunity to talk to others at some length about my work, I'd like now to list a number of topics that haven't yet received attention in this discussion. Some of these are arguments, others are ideas or formulations; some are obvious, at least in outline, some I've learned from others, some I've developed myself; but all I've found peculiarly illuminating in the thinking that went into writing this book. I'd be most grateful for any reflections readers might have on these things, either pro or contra, either their interest and utility in themselves or the way I've employed them in Secret History.

1.) The effort to coordinate thinking about the division of knowledge at the most general and the most particular of levels with thinking about the division of labor in a similar fashion (see, most explicitly, 324-27).

2.) The distinction between positive and negative freedom, especially as I've conceived it in tandem with the difference between the traditional and the modern.

3.) My attempt to juxtapose literary and graphic means of treating form and structure in the representation of spatial relations. Although my ample use of illustrations in Secret History is of course broadly relevant to this topic, it becomes most explicit in my discussion of genre painting in chapter 8, 423-35.

4.) My characterization of what's new about "the public" in the modern world as the virtuality of an imagined social totality whose indefinite inclusiveness is able to admit all of those private, actual individuals who pre-exist and determine the nature of that whole. I speak most directly about this conceptualization at 106-9 and 324, where it's exemplified not only by the public sphere, the market, and representative democracy but also by the realm of aesthetic experience.

5.) The theory that the transition from traditional to modern notions of "personality' is marked by a shift in the location of "the natural" from the social to the sexual register: see 274-77.

Thanks in advance. And for those readers who haven't purchased a copy of Secret History, the paperback edition is scheduled to be available by the end of October at about half the price of the hardbound.

Michael McKeon

[Since Michael has been so generous in his responses to our queries, I'd like to keep the McKeon collective reading going for at least another day or so. Feel free to use the comments or to do your own posts to respond.--DM]

Michael McKeon Responds, part I

2006-10-06T20:55:00.000-04:00

[Michael McKeon has asked me to post these comments on his behalf--DM]

In the last couple of days I've been using the comments buttons to enter into discussion on specific issues. Today I'd like to post a few responses to recent comments, as well as raise some more general issues about Secret History that may deserve more discussion.

CIVIC HUMANISM

Laura has added to her earlier remarks on the liability of the claim that civic humanism dominates sociopolitical thought around the turn of the 18th century and generates liberal discourse and capitalist ideology as a response to it. As she points out, this claim discourages recognition of the degree and depth of various efforts to confront the effects of emergent capitalist practices that occur well before civic humanism is supposed to have seized the reins of debate in the last two decades of the 17th century. I agree: the diverse range of negative speculation on emergent capitalism is thereby reduced to the ideology of a single posture, that of civic humanism, whose meaning and implications we're supposed already to know. As for positive speculation about capitalist practices, let alone capitalist ideology, the civic-humanism-as-dominant thesis would deny its very existence until the ch critique has generated a positive defense of it. This thesis isn't supported by the evidence (see pp. 24-33; those interested in a fuller critique of the ch thesis on both substantive and methodological grounds may want to read my essay "Civic Humanism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation," which will appear in a collection of essays on JGA Pocock edited by DeAnn DeLuna). Moreover the ch thesis imperialistically lays claim to defining the perspective of anyone who uses ideas or words ("corruption," "luxury," apprehension regarding the virtuality of credit, etc.) that the proponents of that thesis identify as the intellectual property of ch.

MASTER NARRATIVES

So the ch thesis is in my view a good example of what's wrong with master narratives (another topic Laura addresses): that is, not with form itself but the form when practiced badly. Master narratives are simply large versions of what all of us necessarily do whenever we generalize broadly about the meaning of the particular phenomena we're treating. The real question in all such cases is: how persuasive is the fit between particular instances and overarching generalization? How open is the generalization to particular instances that would seem on the face of it to contradict it? How supple is the generalization in adjusting to the presence of particulars that clearly *do* challenge it? Some master narratives--I think Margaret Doody's True Story is a good example--posit a vast thesis that never is subjected to this sort of questioning; "the novel" is simply asserted to have existed in classical antiquity and to be accessible to us over time as the history of the influence of (what conventional usage calls) "the Greek romance." Both Dave--"pulling things together"--and Laura--the "accumulation of evidence"--speak of the virtues of a master narrative that throws its net very wide so as to be able to generalize about a very broad range of evidence; and this is what I've tried to do in Secret History. But the most important feature of a master narrative that does its job is its capacity to put particulars and generals in dialectical relation and ongoing reciprocity. My greatest ambition in Secret History was to construct an argument of great breadth but, at the most abstract level, also of relative simplicity, one whose broad plausibility might be confirmed by reference to the different kinds of evidence it mobilizes at several levels of particularity. The virtue of simplicity is not that it sums up everything with full adequacy to all it refers to, but that it provides a heuristic key by which to discover similarities between phenomena that at levels of increasing particularity are quite different from each other. This is what I hoped to do with formulaic lines of thought that run throughout the book, like distinction-separation-conflation, tacit-explicit, division-dialectical recapitulation, the devolution of absolutism, from domestication to domesticity. In the Introduction (xx) I approach this generalizing aim from another direction, one that specifies the variety of spheres of human experience that may be brought together under the generalization that "the division of one term into two ... has played an important part in substantiating the notion that the modern relation of the public and the private has entailed a splitting of a former tacit whole into oppositional and self-sufficient parts." The singular categories by which I then exemplify this generalization are estate, status, gender, honor, propriety, religion, subjecthood, knowledge, romance, and individual. In one of my comments the other day I used one of these categories--the splitting of "knowledge" into "external sense impressions" and "internal creative imagination"--as a kind of shorthand, a way of using the emergence of empirical epistemology and scientific method in particular to summarize the entire historical transformation that's the subject of Secret History. But this is to make epistemology the favored means by which to summarize all other bodies of thought and practice, a risky and potentially biased move if made unconditionally since one might say that it's precisely the epistemologization of knowledge--its disembedding from social practice--that defines the modern viewpoint. So again, the point is not to reduce each of these developments to the status of all others, but to offer a way of toggling back and forth between the sheer multiplicity of experience in a given historical context and the generalizations by which we may find order in diversity.

CRITICAL METHOD

One reason I'm hard put to compare my method with that of other literary historians like Gallagher and William Warner, as Dave has asked me to do, is that my aim in this book is to generalize about historical change by using literary history as only one example among several that profit from being understood in terms of the public-private relationship. That's why I remark that the movement I describe from secret history to domestic novel is meant to offer not a genetic account of the origins of the latter form so much as a "peculiarly persuasive, because structurally eloquent, example of the historical trajectory ... from relations of distinction to relations of separation" (xxi-xxiii). Of course the argument I make in this book grows out of a career of reading both literature and literary criticism focused on the 18th century. But to characterize my method I think I need to have recourse to readings in historiography and historical method, especially the distinction between interpretation and explanation--to simplify, the difference between understanding the past in its own terms and understanding it in terms not available to it. I think historical method needs to pursue both of these approaches. But it seems to me that the major tendency of theory and criticism in the past several decades (often enough with positive results) has been toward a presentist strategy by which the past has been made intelligible according to modern standards of understanding. Over the years I've been more troubled than informed by the results of this tendency, and so in many respects I've aimed here "to view the past not only as a prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past" (xxvii).

Gender, Civic Humanism, Method

2006-10-06T11:18:00.000-04:00

Dave posed a question about my brief comment on gender and civic humanism, and this post is a follow-up. It was originally part of the response to Tita’s post, but has gotten off topic so I am following up here.

One problem that I see, in response to Dave’s question, with the over-emphasis on civic humanism has been not only the burial of Lockean theories of natural rights and the Prostestant/secularizing pre-history of modernity, as Michael McKeon points out in one of his comments (as part of the ongoing response to Tita Chico’s original post), but also more of a recognition of the extent to which 18th-century writers were engaging and confronting emerging capitalist relations as such, working through their implications in more complex ways than just embracing or rejecting. Thus various expressions of distress about the marketplace get categorized as civic humanist resistances to emergent economic practices at the expense of thinking of them as head-on confrontations with historical change and its implications. In the context of civic humanism, Addison and Steele become more interesting than Mandeville or the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. Now admittedly the former are more elegant stylists than the latter and the influence of the rhetoric of civic humanism should not be underestimated. But for those interested, I would point to an important book by E.J. Hundert called The Enlightenment’s Fable (Cambridge 1994), which places Mandeville at the center rather than at the periphery. Mandeville, Hundert argues, "introduced into the heart of European social understanding a series of arguments designed to sustain the radically unsettling conclusion that the moral identities of his contemporaries had been permanently altered by a previously unacknowledged historical transformation." (14) Much Mandeville scholarship, I believe, demonstrates how important Mandeville became to a range of 18th-century thinkers, even (maybe especially) in unacknowledged ways.

Of course, this has to do with gender as well. In the dominance/persistence-of-civic- humanism model, representations of women come to have significance in two ways: (1) hysterical female figures embody fears of commercialization in implicit contrast to stable male figures attached to real property and (2) women serve as civilizing agents against the backdrop of commercialism’s brutality. Well, I read last weekend in The New York Times that hysteria is back. Even so, it is perhaps surprising in some ways that the classic feminist critique of hysteria has not been brought to bear on formulation (1). Certainly and without a doubt we find 18th-century female figures that really do read like hysterical versions of Fortuna. An overextension of this argument, however, runs the risk of obscuring women’s historical contribution to the emergent economy and their particular, vexed relationship to it and the way many 18th-century representations actually confront this. The same perhaps goes for (2), which is convincing in certain ways but also runs the risk of obscuring the way a certain level of material comfort is the precondition for becoming a “civilizing” influence. We might look at this in the context of Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations, which suggests the extent to which women bore the brunt of the brutality of commercialization in Britain. (Not to mention the brutality endured by “women of empire,” to borrow Felicity Nussbaum’s formulation in Torrid Zones.)

The other point I wanted to make responds in part to Carrie Hintz’s post about when modernity happens and Carrie Shanafelt’s post about method. Perhaps the most important contribution of Secret History, and probably the most potentially controversial one as well, is the big picture. Like others, I am looking forward to spending more time thinking about this book (maybe teaching parts of it), but for now I wanted to offer a few preliminary impressions of structure and method. It seems to me that it is made up of much synthesis and many local readings (Dave has mentioned a couple), any one of which could be engaged with, contested, etc. But then there is a kind of accumulation that suggests, for example, structural similarities between Marriage à la Mode and The Rape of the Lock (the juxtaposition of high and low as part of the process of domestication) that add up to a larger point about “modernity” characterized by disembedding, a point nevertheless consistently complicated by a sense of uneven development. Carrie H mentioned medievalist colleagues who will contest certain representations of traditional culture, and we might also find others who will challenge traditionalism itself as a characterization of the period. But you probably also have Victorianist colleagues who will characterize the 18th century as a traditional culture and argue for their own period as the one in which modernity happens. Then there is perhaps the radical alternative of Margaret Doody’s True Story of the Novel, which is not directly an argument about modernity but one piece associated with it, suggesting that there really isn’t much new in terms of narrative in the 18th century at all. On the one hand, I find these explosions of master narratives compelling, especially given that exceptions at any moment can be found. Master narratives can themselves become misleading, flattening, formulaic, and oppressive. On the other hand, what do we give up when we reject them?

Laura

McKeon Collective Reading Extended

2006-10-05T23:05:00.000-04:00

Hello folks,

Since we've got a few stray posts still on their way, and discussion just picking up this evening, we'll keep things going through tomorrow, and beyond, if questions and answers continue.

I also know that we have quite a few lurkers who have been visiting this discussion, and were perhaps a bit nervous about participating. Unlurk yourselves, and ask a question or two. We'd love to hear some more responses to our discussion here.

Best wishes,

DM

Tacit/Explicit Knowledge and the Traditional Society

2006-10-05T11:53:00.000-04:00

McKeon's book is so replete with intriguing examples, and striking readings of visual and written culture that I wish we had a bit more time to absorb and work with the text...but I take comfort in the fact that many of us will continue to discuss the book long after the formal proceedings have ended...here's to this discussion and to Michael McKeon's generosity in joining us as we read his book. Thank you to David Mazella for organizing it, and to Carrie Shanafelt as well.

I would like to hear more & talk more about the concept of "embeddedness" and the transition from "tacit" to "explicit" knowledge. Especially after reading David Mazella's post about McKeon's concept of modernity and the division of knowledge, I was curious to hear if any specialists on premodern cultures have read the book in manuscript or commented on the published text. Are traditional cultures and knowledges really so lacking in "self-conscious and explicit awareness"? Is it possible for any person who possesses language and the capacity for any self-reflection--or dissent or confusion-- to be "embedded" in the tacit practices of a culture? I ask this, I suppose, because I have medieval colleagues who regularly chastise me (however gently & affectionately) for assuming that the epistomelogical/ cultural/ literary changes which congealed into modernity all emerged in the early modern period. I am not offering this as a critique or comment--I'm just curious.

I loved David Mazella's idea of genres that come into focus and fade away--and the many examples in McKeon's book of authors who draw on traditional and archaic modes for their own purposes and reinvent them (Burney's work with the family romance; Matt Bramble's pastoralism and so on). When I was reading McKeon's rich and nuanced section on Behn I was thinking of more contemporary instances of the secret history form, even into the twentieth century...like _Primary Colors_ by Anonymous--and the conflation/ separation dynamic at work in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair...(the ways in which Clinton's public and private roles were separated out, and then conflated, and then separated out again: private marital matters and--unfortunately--his "privates." Some enterprising person might write something comparing Restoration secret histories and the material produced in those giddy and prurient and politically/privately conflated Clinton years...

McKeon, Day 3: Some Final Thoughts, and a Few Questions

2006-10-05T07:29:00.000-04:00

Part 3 of McKeon's book traces the genealogical role of the "secret history" as it fed into the better-known development of the domestic novel during this period. In many respects, this portion resembles the kind of argument and organization found in McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, since we find here a series of readings, some brief, some extended, of individual novels, though these are framed within a story about the emptying-out of the secret history as a genre, and the implications of this emptying-out for the emergent category of domesticity, as well as the private/public differential that helped create it.

By the time we reach writers such as Manley or Haywood, the old function of the secret history as a vehicle for conveying the sexual, dynastic secrets of the powerful had been swamped by other kinds of pleasures,and other forms of particularity (here his account bears comparison with Gallagher's in Nobody's Story). This refunctioning of the secret history genre, which begins with Behn's Love Letters, brings the close analysis of interest and intrigue so typical of Restoration political discourse into alliance with its analysis of love and sexual attraction, so often found in the romance-influenced fiction of this period. When we think of the motives and impulses that drive Behn's characters forward, for example, we find that love has just become war by other means. Though this kind of analysis has its precedents in critics like Miner, for example, McKeon's sensitivity to the peculiar political and erotic power of secrets, and the fascination they hold, make this a very persuasive reading.

To expand on something I mentioned in the comments, I thought the Behn reading was the highlight of this portion, because it captured the complexity of the correspondences between this era's politics and her presentation of its erotics, especially in relation to point of view, narrative structure, and characterization. McKeon's private/public differential helps us recognize what is most fascinating in her presentation of female characters: their often opaque motives, and their freely admitted pursuit of self-interest. But, as McKeon points out, this libidinal, politicized version of inwardness and privacy (always threatened, however, with the catastrophic effects of public scandal) leaves little room for concerns like domestic economy, the household, child-rearing, or any of the projects of social "reproduction" and maintenance that get identified with the domestic novel.

On the most general level, what I most appreciated about this book was its ability to pull together and memorably organize texts and events from really disparate parts of English culture, like the Warming-Pan Baby and the Beau Wilson affair, Behn's Love Letters along with its sodomitical imitators, plus Pope's Windsor Forest and Haywood's Fantomina, all through its very broadly construed dynamic of the public/private differential. I think that we as specialists walk around with a sense that we could, if we wished, articulate how these vastly different things floating around in a particular year, all sort together. But McKeon has really done the work showing how certain key categories and distinctions can effective organize the chaos of cultural history in this manner.

Rather than take the usual reviewer's tack of dumping the book's faults into the second-to-last paragraph, I thought, since we (hopefully) still have McKeon here, that I'd close with some questions that I was left with after finishing the book. I'm hoping that McKeon will take up at least one of these in his response today.

1. As Carrie Shanafelt suggested in her initial post, the Secret History, which seems to extend and broaden the dialectical method found in the Origin of the Novel, seems rather reserved about entering into contemporary methodological debates. Indeed, with the exception of its extended treatment of Habermas, and its very brief discussion of Marx in the Introduction, there is little discussion of method on offer here, apart from the very ample documentation in the footnotes.

I was wondering, then, how this book could be related to works closer to feminist literary history or cultural studies, like Gallagher's Nobody's Story or Warner's Licensing Entertainment. More generally, I was wondering how McKeon or our readers might locate this study in terms of discipline, as something produced within the field of literary or historical studies, or as a synthesis of work done across a number of fields.

And these two questions I drew up specifically for McKeon, if he wished to address them:

2. The book has an interesting "architectural mix" of synchronic and diachronic discussion, chapter by chapter, and part by part. If I could imagine it as a city block, I'd picture it as pretty varied, with skyscrapers, midsize buildings, and little storefront shops sharing the space. Could you talk a little about how you arrived at the organization of the book?

3. As someone who has worked and taught in 18c studies for awhile, I felt pretty comfortable with the range of texts used, and the mix of canonical and non-canonical authors discussed. But I was curious about how you as an author conceived of the audience for this book while you were writing it: educated lay readers? 18c specialists? undergraduates? graduate students?

Best wishes,

DM

McKeon, Day 2: From Domestication to Domesticity

2006-10-04T10:07:00.000-04:00

In yesterday’s post, I laid out what I considered to be the fundamental diachronic storyline of McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity: the “devolution of absolutism” that occurred in England and Great Britain in the seventeenth century, and which ramified in so many directions for the next one hundred and fifty years or so, resulting in a distinctly modern “division of knowledge.” One of the most familiar products of this division of knowledge is our commonsense understanding of “the domestic” as what takes place in spaces cordoned off from the public, and “domesticity” as the abstraction that names and conceptually sustains this separation of the private from the public.

It’s worth emphasizing at this point that there is no necessary relation between the events of the Civil War, for example, and these varied discursive effects involving privacy and publicity. This is one reason why mere conceptual analysis of the semantic history of the term “private” cannot address the historically contingent formations and connections that appear during this period. Instead, McKeon wishes to uncover the appearance of these connections at their moment of emergence. He analyzes, for example, the moment when writers like Haywood first began to demand from her readers a distinctly female “ethical” subjectivity in their responses, one that suggests a particular female role in regulating public morality (454-64). McKeon’s gesture is designed to demystify and explicate this particular ethical stance, which seems part of an emergent ideology of domesticity, and to show it as a product of earlier historical factors.

McKeon’s treatment of the movement from “domestication to domesticity” in part II is particularly interesting in this respect, because he develops an extremely complex notion of “domestication” that precedes and conditions the more familiar notion of “domesticity as privacy.” McKeon’s “domestication,” which seems unthinkable apart from the Civil War’s disruptions of the family-state analogy and its hierarchical assumptions, names all the ways in which the great and the little were accommodated with one another during the long eighteenth century. As he writes; “’to domesticate’ is, after all, ‘to naturalize’ or ‘to familiarize’ the great, the distant, the worldly, the strange, or the foreign by ‘bringing it home’—through the medium of the little, the proximate, the local, the familiar, or the native” (326).

Now this notion of “domestication as accommodation” is extraordinarily suggestive to me, because it helps to explain to me one of the historical mysteries of genre in the long eighteenth century: why does our period have such a large number of “transitional” genres that pop up during this process of modernization, serve their purpose, then disappear altogether or become embarrassments to later critics? I’m thinking of the hegemonic successes of our literary histories, like satire and mock epic in the Restoration or Augustan periods, which flourish and then flame out after their cultural moment, but also about our specialist fare, like Restoration tragicomedy or the conduct book, all those works popular in our period though rarely reread afterwords. What McKeon’s historical schema points out is that all of these genres shared this broader impulse of “bringing it home,” accommodating great and little, ancient and modern, epic and romance, etc. etc. with techniques of formal segmentation that helped their readers stabilize their relation to the normative in the face of historical change. McKeon’s historical schema is buttressed with his series of formal analyses of sub-genres like the mock epic or the pastoral, which again address the remarkable preponderance and popularity of generic mixtures across the long eighteenth century, even though these mixtures’ popularity did not survive the period. The critical fate of genres like the pastoral suggests that its mid-eighteenth-century accommodations of historical change were soon overtaken by further, more sweeping changes in the country and the city. What McKeon has articulated here is a global theory of eighteenth-century genres that enables us to recognize their social and historical conditioning and their interconnectedness without falling into the trap of treating a single genre, e.g., the eighteenth-century novel, as the sole vehicle of modernization. [Here I should note as an aside the curious absence of Williams’ and especially Empson’s reading of pastoral, whose readings of the country and the city and the “double-plot” I thought anticipated some of the implications of “domestication.”]

I’ll close by commending McKeon’s sensitive readings of the Martha and Mary paintings at the end of ch. 8 (423-35), which show how the formal and thematic strategies of segmentation and accommodation can be found in the visual arts, as well.

I should note here that I’ve said very little about gender, which represents a special instance of domestication as an accommodation of great and little, to the extent that domestication leads to domesticity as we understand it. This could bear further discussion. I’d also like to see if anyone, including Michael, could tackle the distinction between “narrative concentration” and “narrative concretization,” which I must admit still seems murky to me (437-48).

Best wishes,
DM

McKeon on "the division of knowledge": when does Modernity know itself to be "modern"?

2006-10-03T14:51:00.000-04:00

As I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog, I’ve been teaching Richardson’s Clarissa while reading McKeon’s Secret History, and their conjunction has made me see a number of resemblances between the two books. At the most obvious level, these are both big, encyclopedic books, and together they weigh so much they cannot be safely stowed in the same book bag. Just as obviously, their large scope and close management of details disclose the sheer size of their authors’ ambitions. Both evidence the authorial desire to lay before readers a comprehensive picture of persons and events, and both offer an impressively top-down structure, featuring a large-scale argument buttressed with a full apparatus of quotations, footnotes, and (in McKeon’s case) illustrations.

My class’s discussions of the temporal experience of reading Richardson’s book also reinforced this comparison for me, since I felt a similar sense of immersion while working through the Secret History and corresponding with others about our progress. In an interesting way, this blog’s format of the “collective reading” has recreated something of the spirit of Richardson’s correspondence with his readers, though I doubt that any of us will beg McKeon to change the ending of his book.

As a work of criticism, however, The Secret History of Domesticity is devoted to the distinctively modern “division of knowledge” that emerged out of the historical transition from the early modern to the modern period in England and Great Britain. In political and cultural terms, we are talking about the massive set of displacements and disruptions that accompanied the “devolution of absolutism” following the Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution. These historical changes ramified in the most disparate parts of Anglo-British culture for the next hundred years or so, in areas like political debates, literary genres, graphic arts, architecture, and so forth. McKeon, however, is not merely arguing the sheer contingent fact of change in all these areas (which I think we all know already), but is attempting to pursue something more difficult and evasive: how were all these historical changes assimilated conceptually into this period’s division of knowledge, particularly in its knowledge of itself as “modern”?

McKeon’s answer fastens upon the difference between public and private knowledge as this important difference is registered in “traditional,” as opposed to “modern,” cultures [the scare quotes are McKeon’s, and suggest that these distinctions are purely heuristic]. McKeon writes:

In “traditional” cultures, the differential relationship between public and private modes of experience is conceived as a distinction that does not admit of separation. In “modernity” the public and private are separated out from each other, a condition that both sustains the sense of traditional distinction and, axiomatically, reconstitutes the public and private as categories susceptible to separation (xix).

McKeon goes on to talk about the importantly “tacit” and holistic aspects of knowledge in “traditional” cultures, where knowledge is “deeply embedded in a political, social, and cultural matrix of practice” that discourages its separation for “self-conscious examination.” (We may note how much of this is already suited for being analyzed not just in terms of the absolutist state, but also in terms of communications media, as the new articulations of difference made possible by the development of print forms of communication)

Modernity, however, is precisely what allows members of a culture to begin conceptualizing their own institutions and situations “as such,” allowing them to separate out things from the circumstances in which they are “embedded”:

“Modern” knowledge is, on the contrary an explicit and self-conscious awareness, characterized not by the way it saturates social practice [as we find in traditional knowledge] but by the way it satisfies the canons of epistemology, which impose upon knowledge the test of self-justifying self-sufficiency. Disembedded from the matrix of experience it seeks to explain, modern knowledge is defined precisely by its explanatory ambition to separate itself from its object of knowledge sufficiently to fulfill the demand that what is known be divided from the process by which it is known (xix).

McKeon’s story, then, involves the manner in which large-scale historical changes, and the disruptions they create, help to condition and produce new forms and divisions of knowledge, which are centered upon a new understanding of the difference between public and private.

And yet McKeon also insists that this story of large-scale historical change, which comprehends the entire period known as “the Enlightenment,” involves not just separation but also “conflation,” which he describes as “the demystication not only of traditional distinctions but also of modern separations” (xxiv). In the close interplay of separation and conflation during the Enlightenment period, we discover, in McKeon’s words, a “fundamental tool of modern thought” (xxiv-xxv).

So we begin to see just how intricately this interplay operates in McKeon’s discussion of the period, and how his subject-matter encompasses not merely events or texts as such, but how these came to be distinguished from one another, or conversely, how they came to be conflated together during this period (in the form of genres like the “secret history,” for example, or as historical macro-narratives like the “devolution of absolutism”).

This approach accounts not just for the scale of the book but the interestingly Richardsonian stance of McKeon vis a vis his book's arguments and events, in which various historical perspectives emerge to do discursive battle, then withdraw, reappear, or disappear altogether in accordance with their author's bidding.

As I hope to show in tomorrow's essay, McKeon's approach also allows for a systematic and historical approach to the questions of genre in this period. That seems to me to be the biggest contribution on offer here.

David Mazella

Tita Chico on McKeon's notion of "privacy"

2006-10-03T11:11:00.000-04:00

[I am posting this on behalf of Tita Chico--DM]

I’m traveling this week (recruiting grad students for the University of Maryland—please encourage your interested undergraduates!) and won’t be free to participate in the collective reading as it happens. So following Dave’s suggestion, I’m offering these thoughts and questions ahead of time, by way of opening up conversation on McKeon’s very engaging book. I’m particularly interested in how McKeon conceptualizes, through definition, argument, and example, “private” throughout The Secret History.

It seems to me that McKeon, of course, leans on Habermas’s division for insight, but that in so doing, he also replicates some of the same problems. While acknowledging, repeatedly, that the public and private emerge dialectically, McKeon states that the antithesis between them is the key precondition for modernity, suggesting that the public and the private have an “interpenetrative conflation” (48)—a qualification, I believe, of the precise nature of the dialectic that Habermas charts. I also think that McKeon is right to suggest that Habermas alludes to but does not analyze what McKeon discusses as an “intimate sphere” in both conceptual and architectural terms. But it is here that McKeon’s notion of privacy begins to confuse. For all of the emphasis on dialectical emergence (and allowance for “interpenetrative conflation”), there seems to be lingering a presupposition of “authenticity” with this intimate sphere, whether he sets up an implicit opposition between “sacrificing the private to the public” and “bringing the private into public discourse” (109) or establishes the key binaristic terms of the book more generally in the introduction by suggesting that privacy is a “movement ‘inward’” that becomes associated with “’the people,’ the family, women, the individual, personal identity, and the absolute subject” (xxii).

Why, in an argument designed to articulate the emergence of “privacy” as opposed to the public, is there an assumption of authenticity associated with the private, when so much work in the field suggests that this gesture to “the private”—whether conceptual or spatial—is not a site of essential authenticity? I’m here thinking of a variety of scholars. Norbert Elias argues that there is a foundational association between “alienation and the increase in consciousness, the ascent to a new level on the spiral staircase of consciousness” (The Court Society, 245-6, 250). For Elias, modern individuals (in the French court) self-consciously insert a gap between “the affective, spontaneous impulse to act and the actual performance of the action in word or deed” (243). Or Francis Barker’s earlier The Tremulous Private Body, which opens with a reading of Pepys’s Diary that not only suggests that domestic spaces are shaped by reading, writing, and sexual desire, but that they are also scenes where authenticity is absolutely thwarted and resisted. Pepys’s Diary famously hides things within its secret, private pages, suggesting that privacy as authentic is itself illusory—is this instead a founding fiction of privacy? I’m thinking, too, of Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator,” which constructs a sense of self (not an authentic claim of selfhood) in relation to others, and—of course, since I’ve written about it—the lady’s dressing room, deeply associated with theatricality, dissembling, and performance. So McKeon’s turn to domestic spaces (and plans) is likewise intriguing, but it seems here, too, to be an occasion to imagine them, at least sometimes, as stable signifiers of “privacy.” The example of Millimant’s marriage demands, for example (p. 226) (that she may “dine in my dressing room when I’m out of humour without giving a reason. To have my Closet Inviolate; to be sole Empress of my Tea-Table, which you must never presume to approach without first asking leave”) seems to be an indication not only that these were distinguished private spaces within the domestic architecture (McKeon’s point), but also that domestic spaces connoted a network of social relations, whether intimate, commercial, erotic, or what have you. I think that Amanda Vickery’s work is helpful in this way, too, pointing out the specific connections between the so-called domestic household and women’s engagement with commercial institutions, for example. Ok, I’ll leave off here, but am intrigued by what I’ve gotten as a kind of privileging of “the private” with the authentic, and the ways that this seems simultaneously to explain some things and to foreclose others.

Tita Chico

[Though Tita will be out of town for the next few days, feel free to post your comments or suggestions on this, since the rest of us would like to hear your responses. Thanks, DM]

McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity: First Impressions

2006-10-03T05:49:00.000-04:00

My first impression upon dipping into Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity was that it is very little like becoming absorbed in an idiosyncratic narrative of history, and much more like walking into a vast museum full of stunning pieces and not knowing where to look first. As he makes clear in the "Questions of Method" section of the introduction, McKeon is keenly aware that approaching a vast array of texts and historical situations with any guiding idea in mind readily yields an oversimple objection.

The nature of this objection may be evoked by citing its most frequent negative signposts: abstraction, reduction, teleology, evolution, master narrative. (xxv)

I immediately thought of the many enormous "histories of the book," which, no matter how detailed or carefully and complexly argued, fall prey to these objections if only because their authors proceed chronologically and with an implicit (or explicit) causality. McKeon takes great pains, in the theoretical chapters, to avoid this kind of chronological-narrative structure.

Rather, he asserts that there clearly was a self-conscious separation of the public and private spheres that occurred sometime between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth in England. Instead of examining the public-private separation from the teleological perspective of "Where do we come from?", McKeon instead concentrates on "How did this emerge?"

The significance of the early modern public sphere comes into focus when we approach it not from the present but from the past, not as social scientists testing its adequacy to modern liberal democratic standards of social justice but as historians aware of its context—aware, that is, of what it replaces. (74-75)

He proceeds to hash mostly unchronologically through various examples of what he calls the "explicitation" of that difference, which had previously existed merely as a distinction. To clarify:

The modern separation out of the public and the private is [...] like the abstraction of labor [in Marxism], a disembedding of figure from ground, an "explicitation" of what tacitly had always been there but now, in becoming explicit, also takes on new life. (xix-xx)

McKeon is not particularly interested in conjecturing about various authors' attitudes toward their public and private figures, as there has always been an implicit distinction there. The special thing about the conceptualization of public discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that, suddenly, it becomes one of the main explicit concerns of writers and other public figures. In reference to Charles Taylor's conception of the "social imaginary," McKeon writes:

Modern social imaginaries are [...] reflexive entities in the radical sense that they not only refer to themselves explicitly and self-consciously; they also constitute themselves through that explicitating act of self-reference. For this reason their deployment of a collective agency bears an illuminating relationship to the self-actualizing capacities of the linguistic performative. (107)

As any of us working in the long eighteenth century are aware, almost every author of the period has passages explicitly describing, defending, and even performatively constructing a particular relationship between the public and the private selves of the author, or even between the private and public selves of the reader. The text itself self-consciously serves as a mediator between those selves, both creating a public community for discourse through the publicity of publication and offering a subject for private contemplation. McKeon moves through hundreds of these private-public passages, many of them immediately familiar, demonstrating again and again how carefully each text defines this separation.

Beyond a few hypotheses, McKeon resists any kind of extended theorizing about this separation apart from short responses to each of his wonderful examples. This method allows the reader of The Secret History of Domesticity to draw many of her own conclusions while being gently nudged in certain directions by the author. As a student working on theories of sovereignty and the public sphere, I often found myself putting McKeon's book down while my mind leaped from one possible application to the next. It is hard to point to any one particular passage in McKeon that explicitly forms the entirety of his theoretical assumptions, which are somewhat elusive. He allows the historical and literary examples to speak through the filters of excerption and arrangement, rather than through the bullhorn of a dominating theoretical approach.

I am particularly fortunate that we decided to review this book and that Dave Mazella arranged this event. This book is the missing link I was looking for in my dissertation research, and I think it will stay with me for a long time.

Dictionary of Sensibility

2006-10-02T13:29:00.000-04:00

Picking up on Carrie Shanafelt's remark about the term "sentiment"--and all its weight and baggage in the period--I was reminded of the marvellous online resource, "The Dictionary of Sensibility" by Corey Brady, Virginia Cope, Michael Millner, Ana Mitric, Kent Puckett and Danny Siegel.

There are 24 terms listed on the site, and each term is linked to primary and secondary resources. As the authors explain:

"This hypertext offers a new approach to understanding the language of sensibility, one that accounts for the multiple possibilities of meaning. Rather than attempting hard-line definitions, this project offers the tools for recognizing the multivalent connotations of such sensibilious words as 'virtue,' 'sense,' and 'benevolence.' Our hypertext groups excerpts from major words of sensibility according to 24 primary words; we imagine the sensibilious reader exploring these passages to glean a new understanding of the vocabulary and the literature of the period."

Here's the link:
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary/

The Dictionary could be an intriguing model for class projects and humanities computing projects as well.

Domestic histories: another perspective

2006-10-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

Much to my regret, I won't have time to participate in this week's reading event. But let me offer you instead a few mostly half-baked thoughts on a different kind of 'domestic' sphere - livestock husbandry - which also has an important place in the long 18th century.

Yesterday's Guardian had a review of Jenny Uglow's biography of the engraver Thomas Bewick. The paper version was illustrated with one of Bewick's engravings, the Leicestershire Improved Breed (from A general history of quadrupeds).

Bewick's interests ranged far beyond portraits of prize livestock; but the genre was much in vogue from the late 18th century onwards and well into the 19th century, until prints and paintings were superseded by photography. This went in step with the rise of livestock improvement and 'new breeds' (now of course very old breeds, and most of them very rare to boot).

Fashions of the time dictated that size (no doubt contrasting with the general run of small, skinny, scrubby mongrels at the time) was everything - the John Bulls of the animal world, you might even say. Vast cattle, fat sheep and long pigs, all perfectly groomed and set against a backdrop of idyllic pastures, sometimes tended by equally well-groomed, plump, smug yokels. No real sheep ever looked quite like these: the animal portrait was intended to advertise, and idealise, a breeder's wares.

They look so strange and quaint to us. But in the late 18th century these animals were at the cutting edge of scientific farming. They can be seen as symbols of 'progress', and a domestic and practical application of 'the Enlightenment'. And I think the impulse to have them painted was both hard-headedly commercial and sentimental.

A few links:

Thomas Bewick
Bewick Society

Livestock in Art
A matter of good breeding
Farm animal portraits

Teaching 18th century Keywords

2006-09-30T10:21:00.000-04:00

Miriam's post about "effeminate" reminded me of the moment in my Clarissa class where I had to explain her use of the term, "friends." My students, some of whom are reading an 18th century novel for the first time in this grad seminar, were a bit quizzical, until I could point to Doody's fine discussion of its relatively broad meaning in the period, so that it encompassed one's family and family-connections as well as one's intimate, unrelated companions. Of course, the irony in every character's use of the term grows stronger throughout the novel. Clarissa's family are NOT her friends, and cannot be friends in the strong sense that Anna Howe is (with all the additional meanings that fill out and personalize our sense of authentic friendship: loyalty, integrity, and the desire to defend her friend).

Teaching the "keywords" of a particular era seems an important part of what we do when we try to provide context for literary works and interpretation, because these mediate between the primary text (which students have read) and all the secondary texts and subsidiary texts (which we have read and reflected upon). It is as necessary in survey courses as it is in grad seminars.

So how do we do it? Any ideas about imparting to students the period flavor of a term like "virtue" or "romance"? Do you handle it in lectures or supplemental reading or criticism? What terms have you found necessary to explain to your students, at any level?

Best,

DM

Dorothy Van Ghent on the Clarissa-myth

2006-09-27T13:45:00.000-04:00

Today I'm working off of Allen's fine post on Clarissa in the classroom, and introducing into discussion one of my favorite pieces of 20th century Richardson criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent's Clarissa Harlowe chapter in The English Novel: Form and Function (1953). Here we find an interesting contrast with Watt's discussion, which came out 3 years later, and is probably better known.

What I find so intriguing about this piece, apart from its teachability, is the fact that Van Ghent insists on the centrality of rape for the symbolic structure of this novel, and yet articulates how oddly that "centrality" operates: more like an absence than a presence, more a process around something than a thing or an event in itself:

This slow and hovering [epistolary] form endows the physiological event--the rape--with profound attraction and significance by holding it up slantwise to view in a murk of shadows, turning it mysteriously, allowing it to emerge slightly, withdrawing it, allowing it to emerge again, and so on. It is as tantalizing and evasive as a trout (47).

I must say there is nothing in Watt comparable to this in insight, even if Watt does make similar points about the epistolary form. Part of the reason for Van Ghent's superiority, I'd argue, is that Watt seems unaware of how centrally this metaphor of rape inflects Richardson's treatment of "privacy," one of Watt's key terms. And Watt has nothing comparable to Van Ghent in her treatment of what she calls the "Clarissa-myth," her treatment of how the novel's "imagery and symbols" aggregate into an extraordinary double-structure of myth, through "reiteration and accumulation," into something immensely powerful. The Clarissa-myth, however, takes its power precisely from the contradictions it holds:

[Clarissa's] mythical features still appear to us--for it would be a mistake to think that the Clarissa-myth does not still have deep social and psychological roots--in her two chief aspects: they appear on the covers of Vogue magazine, in the woman who is a wraith of clothes, debile and expensive, irrelevant to sense-life or affectional life, to be seen only; and they appear on the covers of True Confessions and True Detective Stories, in the many-breasted woman with torn dishabille and rolling eyeballs, a dagger pointing at her, a Venus as abstract as the Vogue Venus in her appeal to the eye and the idea alone, but differing in that she is to be vicariously ripped and murdered. Clarissa is a powerful symbol because she is both (50).

Unlike Watt, Van Ghent seems to realize how the "realism" of Clarissa does not in any way contradict the novel's "mythic" or symbolic structure, largely because the details function as part of the process of reiteration and accumulation that alert us to the presence of myth: think about Clarissa's "silk brocades," for example, and how they stand for the Harlowes' persistent misunderstanding of Clarissa's desires.

And yet even as good a reader as Van Ghent insists that Clarissa's fear of rape can only represent a fear of sexuality, a "Puritan" hatred of sexuality that can only represent desire in the act of disavowal, can only depict sexual transgression if it is accompanied with the promise of punishment.

So how to teach the novel without simply reiterating its myth of punishment?

DM

Effeminate women

2006-09-26T14:59:00.000-04:00

[Xposted to my blog]

Yesterday in my graduate seminar we discussed Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions. It was a lively discussion — they are an interested group — and at one point someone brought up the ways in which the two armies in Bell in Campo are described. "Masculine" is used to describe the army of men, while "feminine" and "effeminate" would seem to be used interchangeably to describe Lady Victoria's army of women. It is also used to insultingly refer to men who prefer to stay home rather than fight. This led to a sweeping pronouncement from me about the ways in which the definitions of words often narrow and focus over time; it would seem that at one time "effeminate" could have been used to mean more or less "feminine" without any shading — though it was also used in our contemporary sense — but now it is used pretty exclusively as a pejorative applied to gay men who are perceived as lacking in "masculine" traits. We discussed various female equivalents and unpacked the some of the meanings "Amazon" held in the period.

This is one reason, among many, that I like the 18thc: English, always in flux, is just at enough of a remove after three centuries, give or take, that it is deceptively familiar. But upon closer examination there are significant little moments of vertigo, moments which can be useful as an entrée into a discussion of, say, gender roles.

[Speaking of language, awhile back on C18-L Jim Chevalier linked to a useful glossary of 18thc terms. I downloaded the list myself but have mislaid the link and invite you to post it again, Jim, if you are reading this.]

ESTC online

2006-09-26T14:38:00.000-04:00

[Xposted to my blog]

Just found out that the British Library is offering free online access to the English Short Title Catalogue. Most, most excellent. Heads up from Stephen Karian on C18-L.

Teaching Philosophies and the Job Search

2006-09-25T18:34:00.000-04:00

Oy vey. I'm preparing to enter the job market and I'm facing the prospect of having to write a statement of teaching philosophy. I find these statements to be the hardest things of all of the application materials to write. I've written some informal statements before, for use within the writing program at DU only. These were very brief--about a paragraph--and focused on my teaching of writing. Now, however, I'm faced with the prospect of writing a statement that is much longer, much more complex, and much more important.

The problem is that my "philosophy" of teaching is pretty intuitive. I am having a really hard time describing why and how I do the things I do on a daily basis in the classroom. I've looked at a variety of online guides for writing the statement of teaching philosophy and I've looked at a few sample statements--most of which were not written by English professors. So I wondered if anyone has any suggestions or indeed any comments about how these statements are used/have been used by hiring departments. My fear is that, as one article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggested, these statements can hurt more than they can help.

"Clarissa" and every fourth female reader

2006-09-25T15:37:00.000-04:00

It is estimated that one in every four women will experience rape or attempted rape at some point during their four years in college. According to the latest numbers from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, one in six women overall will experience some variety of attempted or completed rape, and 80% of these are women under the age 30. Almost two-thirds of all rapes were committed by non-strangers, and 17% are committed by someone the victim knows intimately.

And the situation for young women attending college parties and dance raves has gotten much, much worse. The most alarming development since the 1990s is the easy availability of what the Drug Enforcement Agency calls “predatory drugs.” These include Rohypnol (commonly known as “roofies” or the “date rape drug”), GHB (“liquid ecstasy” or “grievous bodily harm”), and Ketamine (“special K” or “cat tranquilizers). The most common of these, Rohypnol, is a sedative ten times stronger than valium, and in the year 2000, four million doses were intercepted coming from Mexico alone. Since the effects can last up to eight hours, women at parties who have perhaps accepted drinks containing the tasteless and odorless drug can wake up in a basement or fraternity house with no recollection whatsoever of what has been done to her, by whom, and how many times.

If you typically have twelve women in the classroom when you teach Clarissa, the odds are that three of them has, or will have, an experience with rape or attempted rape. It’s also a safe estimate that at least one of those three will have had that experience connected with a predatory drug. That bears repeating: every time we teach Clarissa, we need to assume that at least one of the women in the room has experienced something similar to, or even worse than, what Clarissa experienced in her rape.

Do we have a responsibility, therefore, to adjust our approach to class discussions of this still-controversial novel? If so, we are forced to juxtapose two dangerously contradictory messages in our common pedagogy of the eighteenth-century novel. On the one hand there are the familiar feminist and Marxist readings that Clarissa’s death, while certainly objectionable, is nevertheless the victory of the spirit over the polluted body, the dominance of an independent will over the oppression of the patriarchy, and the rise of the empowered feminine bourgeoisie against the fall of the corrupt masculine aristocracy. Clarissa is admired, and rightly so, for seizing her right to self-determination in the way that she sees fit. On the other hand, these same feminist readers would surely endorse the counselors, crisis centers, and ministers that give these same students a radically different message about healthy reactions to rape: anorexia and thoughts of suicide are the wrong path; the victim is not to blame; the body has been violated, but not ruined; virginity is a state of mind, not a state of being; and sins need not be atoned for because the victim has done nothing which God needs to forgive.

How can, and should, the rape of Clarissa be taught to today’s students in light of Richardson’s aims to portray her as an ideal Christian martyr and the essence of virtuous femininity?

Housekeeping

2006-09-24T12:54:00.000-04:00

I wanted to write a quick post here to update where The Long Eighteenth is, so far. If people would like, I'll make this a regular (maybe bi-weekly?) feature.

So far, we have sixteen contributors with access to the front page. Many of you have yet to introduce yourselves, so please remember that it's not too late. This was formed as an international and interdisciplinary site, so your perspectives on eighteenth-century scholarship and pedagogy will be greatly welcomed.

We also have an active and responsive commentariat. Allen Michie has proposed that we find a way to get larger space for comments, but Haloscan keeps a strict 10,000-character limit on comment length, unless we are willing to spring for Haloscan Premium. I imagined, in my paranoid brain, that it was expensive, but now I find it's a one-time fee of $12. I will be happy to pay this when my checks come in, but due to endless administrative errors, I have not been paid yet this semester and have $24 to my name. The widow's mite? I'd rather buy eggs, at the moment; then I'll pony up for Premium.

The other suggestion I have for our prolific commenters (who are truly thoughtful and amazing—I seem to be the only one-liner among us) is to ask yourself, "Could my reply to this post be posed as a post on the front page?" We needn't confine all our conversations to comment format, which can be rather limited, both in format and readership. If you have a substantive response to another post, it would generate more conversation (and traffic) to respond with a post, linking to the previous post's permalink page. (I have never written so many P's in one paragraph in my life.)

Speaking of traffic, here is a screenshot of the traffic we've had since August 15th:

If the text of this image is illegible on your computer, click on it to view it full-size.

The orange part of the graph reflects the returning visitors, the blue part represents new visitors, and the green part reflects the total number of clicks, which includes people reading through older entries and refreshing their browsers. You'll notice there is a natural ebb and flow of traffic, which roughly corresponds to the work week. (For some reason, half as many people read blogs on Fridays.) Spikes in traffic occur whenever another blog links to us or when people post to C18-L about this site.

Our first blog event is coming up, of course, on October 3-5, when we'll be discussing Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity, in conversation with the author. Thanks to David Mazella for setting up this exciting event! I urge everyone to contact your colleagues and students to let them know about this. I sent an email to my department and found that everyone from Renaissance to Romanticism was excited to hear about it.

Again, I urge, with regard to posting, that we not be shy about it. Many people seem concerned about accidentally posting at the same time as someone else. In my experience, this is not a problem at all. People tend to read through feed aggregators that list posts by title and subject, and even those who read by clicking on the page seem to have no problem finding and reading whatever is new.

You will also notice that there is a new, improved "Recent Comments" section in the sidebar. Haloscan has finally put out its own ad-free widget, and I love it. I hope you do, too.

Thank you, everyone, for your ongoing contribution to this project. Although I am young, I am continually impressed by how effective the internet has become at creating communities of people who want and need to speak to one another. Please spread the word, and feel free to start conversations here at will!

Where to?

2006-09-23T20:50:00.000-04:00

I'm curious about the conferences people are planning to attend this year, either in terms of presentations or panels chaired. At least some of the ASECS decisions must have been made by now, and I've seen some CFPs for SCSECS and NEASECS. (Is it my imagination, or isn't there a lot more last-minute scrambling for ASECS presenters than previous years?)

I just received the SCSECS CFP, in fact, from Laura Stevens at U. Tulsa, and I read there that Eugenia Zuroski, at U. Arkansas, who posted here a while ago, is chairing a panel on "Importing and Exporting National Identity." Lots of other good stuff, including presentations from Carla Mulford and Susan Staves. For more info, it's best to contact Laura at laura-stevens@utulsa.edu before Oct. 15.

So where are you going? What are you presenting on?

DM

Samuel Johnson Teaches Composition: The Preceptor

2006-09-22T21:30:00.000-04:00

After our discussion of Carrie's ungrateful "remnant," I thought it would be helpful to recall one of the eighteenth century's most famous failed schoolmasters, Samuel Johnson. In his Preface to the Preceptor (1748), Johnson gives us a description of the eighteenth century schoolroom (all male, of course) that sounds mighty familiar to me:

Every man, who has been engaged in teaching, knows with how much
difficulty youthful minds are confined to close application, and how
readily they deviate to any thing, rather than attend to that which is
imposed as a task. That this disposition, when it becomes inconsistent
with the forms of education, is to be checked, will readily be granted;
but since, though it may be in some degree obviated, it cannot wholly be
suppressed, it is surely rational to turn it to advantage, by taking
care that the mind shall never want objects on which its faculties may
be usefully employed. It is not impossible, that this restless desire of
novelty, which gives so much trouble to the teacher, may be often the
struggle of the understanding starting from that to which it is not by
nature adapted, and travelling in search of something on which it may
fix with greater satisfaction.

It is fascinating how Johnson turns this discussion of the classroom toward one of his favorite themes, the danger of boredom. For Johnson the ex-schoolmaster, one of the chief causes of schoolboys' inattention must be the demand that they read as a group from an identical text, even while they demonstrate widely varied capacities:

For, without supposing each man
particularly marked out by his genius for particular performances, it
may be easily conceived, that when a numerous class of boys is confined
indiscriminately to the same forms of composition, the repetition of the
same words, or the explication of the same sentiments, the employment
must, either by nature or accident, be less suitable to some than
others; that the ideas to be contemplated may be too difficult for the
apprehension of one, and too obvious for that of another: they may be
such as some understandings cannot reach, though others look down upon
them, as below their regard. Every mind, in its progress through the
different stages of scholastick learning, must be often in one of these
conditions; must either flag with the labour, or grow wanton with the
facility of the work assigned; and in either state it naturally turns
aside from the track before it. Weariness looks out for relief, and
leisure for employment, and, surely, it is rational to indulge the
wanderings of both.

http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/gu011768.pdf

Johnson seems to regard this lack of coordination, and the kind of boredom it engenders, as completely predictable consequences of the classroom. His solution is simply to offer a treatise like The Preceptor to the public, with essays on many different subjects, and with the hope that students with different capacities and temperaments will find what they need.

Perhaps he was not such a bad teacher, after all.

Happy New Year.

DM

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s

2006-09-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading the first three chapters of a new book by John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (OUP 2006). It's a book that is particularly interesting in light of my own work but also in light of the conversations here a few weeks back about Habermas and the coffeehouse, so I thought a brief summary of his argument with a quotation from his section critiquing Habermas might be in order. However, I admit openly that I have read only the first three chapters of the book (which is not terribly long, not McKeonesque at all--it's around 300 pages), and I will therefore not claim to give a complete account of his book or his argument, which is much more complex than I can indicate here.

Barrell's purpose is to investigate the ways in which the political conflict and consequent atmosphere of suspicion in Britain during the revolutionary decade pervaded all aspects of life and thus blurred the lines between what had been conceived of as "public" and "private." Increasingly, as the political furor in Britain grew over the decade, the private realm became politicized, private conversation became public, and even off-the-cuff remarks in spaces (such as the coffee house) that had been conceived of as "private" in some measure were potentially politically dangerous.

In the interest of space I'll skip over his first chapter and go directly to the second, which relates more directly to our earlier conversation about coffeehouses and Habermas. The chapter is titled "Coffee-House Politicians"; in it, Barrell suggests that the coffeehouse--or rather, two fascinating trials that develop out of "seditious utterances" made inside two of London's coffeehouses--is one example where the politicization of private speech during the 1790s is clear. In the first case, an attorney named John Frost was reported for using seditious language in Percy Coffee House. After a delay of several months, one of the witnesses reported Frost to the authorities and Frost was indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to "six months imprisonment and an hour in the pillory" (79). The second case is similar, though it involves two men who were arrested for making seditious remarks in the New London Coffee House; one man was a penniless gentleman and the other an impoverished doctor. The gentleman, Charles Pigott, was released without being charged; the doctor, William Hodgson, was indicted, tried, and convicted. The defense made by Frost's attorney, Thomas Erskine, and Pigott (Pigott published a pamphlet on the eve of Hodgson's trial that offered a defense of himself and to a lesser extent Hodgson) was based on the same assumption: that a coffeehouse was understood by all "polite" people to be a place in which the conversation is "private." Whatever was overheard in the coffeehouse could not actually be "heard." Both Erskine and Pigott therefore protested that a "gentleman" should not be subject to eavesdropping much less prosecution on the basis of conversation that should ostensibly be "private," despite its having taken place in a "public" place. Erskine argued that "words spoken in a public coffee house were words spoken in a private space; that they were, so to speak, privileged; that they should not have been heard by those to whom they were not addressed; that, if inadvertently overheard, they should not have been reported" (83).

The point that Barrell is making in highlighting the defense offered by Erskine and Pigott is that it is class-based. Two men who claimed liberal, reformist sympathies in the event fell back upon essentially aristocratic defenses, motivated at least in part by a distaste for the circumstances of their arrests. Both express disgust at the lack of "politeness" of the men responsible for reporting them, Erskine by frequent emphasis upon the "spirit of a gentleman" and Pigott by highlighting the informers' (lower-class) professions. Barrell concludes, "It is an intriguing index, however, of the difficulty with which the discourse of rights became established, that [Charles James] Fox, Erskine, and others, especially Pigott, who seem to have regarded this [freedom of speech] as a civil right essential to the survival of civilized society, found it so hard to express, except in terms of class difference, the right of an elite not to be overheard by their social inferiors and dependants. The spirit of despotism was not the exclusive property of loyalists" (102). The fact that the defense of these two men was class-based tends to undermine Habermasian descriptions of the coffeehouse as an essentially egalitarian place wherein two men could meet as private men, leaving their public identities (as a hairdresser and a lord, for example) behind, and this is the basis for Barrell's critique of Habermas (which I will quote and then be quiet!):

"'Provided a man has a clean shirt and three-pence in his pocket, he may talk as loud in the coffee-house as the "squire of ten thousands pounds a-year"', wrote the celebrated late eighteenth-century antiquary Francis Grose. Well, perhaps; but this kind of patriotic egalitarian ideology seldom meant quite what it said, and anyone who has been brought up within the English class-system, even as it is 250 or 300 years after the heyday of the coffee house, is likely to have doubts about how far distinctions of rank could possibly have been suspended in public coffee rooms...I am doubtful, too, about the supposed demise of the coffee house in the second half of the century. There were, famously, thousands of coffee houses in London around 1700, but the vast majority of these must have been little local caffs, often in basement rooms, open only for a few hours a day, and patronized by tradesmen on their way to work, who no more expected to be drawn into a discussion of Shakespeare's neglect of the unities than to be offered a latte when they ordered a milky coffee. No more than a handful of early eighteenth-century coffee houses can have come close to Habermas's or Sennett's ideal" (81).

Thoughts?

The Remnant of the Unimpressed

2006-09-20T21:34:00.000-04:00

I hope that title sounds like a horror movie. It should. By now I'm up to the ninth sequel, The Remnant: Life is Very Long.

Now a month into my ninth term of classroom teaching, having taken two year-long fellowship breaks, I finally face two classes full of delightful, smart, engaged, funny English majors, all curious and bright-eyed at the prospect of three hundred years of British literary history. Well, not all of them are so bright-eyed.

In every class I've ever taught, at Case Western Reserve, NYC College of Technology, Hunter College, and now Queens, no matter what the subject or group of students, no matter how exciting and judiciously chosen the texts, no matter how caring, entertaining, strict, or pleading I get, there is always a Remnant of two or three students who seem to wish I was dead.

Go look it up! Somewhere in the annals of my RateMyProfessors.com ratings at each college, you'll find at least one comment reading "B-O-R-I-N-G. Like watching paint dry" or "she is so hyper u want 2 shoot her n the FACE." There are plenty of kind things too ("Carrie is DA BOMB"), and, despite the apologetic comments ("I know she is really hard and obsessed with the 18th century (lolz, C!) but you'll learn alot!!"), I get the sense that my classes leave behind a wake of happy students who've learned something valuable. But in every classroom, the more the tide turns toward engaged, edge-of-the-seat discussion, the deeper into the ether the Remnant drifts.

The problem is that I was usually an eager undergrad, even when I wasn't the most careful reader. I could never keep my hand from shooting up to contribute to conversation, and I know how much my eagerness alone led to me receiving kind help from professors. I never imagined how painful it would be to stand in the front of the room and look out at those few rolling eyes and weary grimaces, those of the people I used to ignore from my teacher's-pet perch.

Things I do to shrink the Remnant:

1. I make participation and attendance a not-insignificant portion of the grade.
2. I talk about the classroom as a laboratory and the need for everyone's voices.
3. I ask them to write for 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every class in response to a question about the reading.
4. I often remind them that admitting to not doing the reading is preferable to lying about not doing the reading.
5. I make eye contact with the quietest students first every time I ask a question, looking for the tell-tale brow-furrow of thought.
6. I ask questions that range from the extraordinarily difficult to the Sunday-School easy.
7. I give research assignments in which each class member becomes the resident "expert" on a topic.

I'd say this makes my odds pretty good, altogether. I've had reluctant students who've said they appreciate that I draw them out without humiliating them. But the Remnant, now down to just one or two per class, remains unmoved. They respond thusly to the above strategies:

1. They declare they're just there to pass, not to excel.
2. They express contempt for their own abilities to contribute.
3. They write nothing down or copy a single way-off-base sentence from a neighbor, verbatim.
4. They continue to lie, waiting for me to challenge them, or they declare they don't have time to read, ever.
5. They stare back, incredibly still, in the hope I'll somehow not see them.
6. They roll their eyes at the easy questions. No meatballs for me, thanks!
7. They refuse to do the research until long past its usefulness to the class.

I plead. I cajole. I contact them by email. I ask their friends what's up. I put the class in a circle. I talk to them after class. This sometimes gets a few on board, but still the shrinking Remnant refuses even to bring the day's reading with them so they can concentrate fully on a space about two inches behind my forehead. What have I done? You'd think I'd killed their goldfish or forced them to read Clarissa. (Still waiting for your explanation of how you get them to do that, David!) I guess they're angry at me for not allowing them to go gently into that good night. I just won't let them fail. I refuse to believe that English literary history is so unlearnable that anyone--especially English majors--should have to take it twice.

Perhaps the problem is my amour propre, rather than their lack of it. I want to feel I'm a good enough teacher to reach them all. I am young and this is what young people do: we imagine we're heroes.

I wonder whether this still happens in elective classes. I'd hope not. British Literature II survey is a requirement for the major at Queens, so I know some of them would rather be reading Bukowski on the lawn with a cigarette, but I've been teaching some incredibly steamy stuff. The only pattern I've noticed is that the size of the Remnant is always smaller in classes with non-humanities majors in them. Who'd have thought?

What do you do with the Remnant? Do you let them do their thing, or do you intervene? How do you wash off all that eye-rolling at the end of the day? Have you eradicated them completely? If so, give me the secret formula!

Teaching Students to Use Secondary Criticism?

2006-09-20T17:32:00.000-04:00

This is really a follow-up to the earlier thread about the library, where we received some interesting posts about how you were teaching your classes about basic practices of library research.

In that earlier thread, I was especially struck by Allen's point about the need to teach students about how to incorporate other critical points of view into their writing, without allowing those other writings to dominate or determine their own positions. This principle seems to be the rationale behind Allen's six source requirement for a 5-6 pp. paper.

As always, I'm curious about how others deal with this in their lower- and upper-division courses, whether they choose for their classes the secondary criticism they use for research papers, and how they teach students the balancing act that we sometimes struggle with in our own writing.

If you have suggestions for especially useful works of criticism that function well in your courses and lectures, please share those with us.

Best,

DM

Essays and Encyclopedias: Critical Genres

2006-09-19T11:20:00.000-04:00

Now that we've discussed the varying scale and scope of some 18th century genres, I want to turn this issue of scale around to consider it in relation to the critical genres that we read and write in.

I'm thinking about the full range of scholarly or critical genres that we have become familiar with: everything from the McKeonesque (soon to become a scholarly euphemism, like "Rubenesque") monograph or the multivolume, multieditor critical edition like the California Dryden or the Yale Johnson; the heavily armored scholarly article; the sometimes lopsided variety of the essay collection; to the more slender and elegant forms of belletristic essays or what trade publishers call "nonfiction." I'd also throw in the more ephemeral but no less valuable emanations of the classroom or the publishing world, which constitute their own versions of "publication," in the sense of "making public": the book review, the seminar or conference presentation, the encyclopedia entry, and even (god forbid!) the bl-g.

To give a familiar example, it's always seemed significant to me that Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, for all its problems, was always being contested and revised by much larger and more complex books, which never quite managed to displace it. So Watt's success came as much from his selection of the evidence as from his scholarly range.

So which of these forms do you find most useful to read or write in, and why? How does their length affect your use? What are the peculiar virtues of these genres?

DM

Essays and Encyclopedias

2006-09-17T22:19:00.000-04:00

This evening I was commiserating over emails with my friend Laura Rosenthal, who has kindly agreed to be one of the respondents for the McKeon collective reading three weeks from now (October 3-5).

Laura and I are both making our way through McKeon's book, and I mentioned that I was also reading Clarissa with my class this month (not that I was looking for sympathy or anything). Laura, I discovered, was currently reading Sir Charles Grandison.

And my first thought was that people working in our field routinely contend with big books of criticism and even bigger books of fiction. The most remarkable part of this is how much we take this aspect of 18c studies for granted, even when our students don't.

Margaret Doody has a nice essay in the Cambridge Guide to the 18c novel, where she relates Richardson and Clarissa especially to what she calls the "encyclopedic" imperative of Enlightenment thought, an imperative unthinkable without the burgeoning technological and economic advances of print and print culture happening in Richardson's lifetime. This encyclopedic urge seems to lurk behind the most remarkable achievements of the European Enlightenment, not just Diderot and d'Alembert, but Gibbon and Bayle as well. And focusing on the collective intellectual exchanges of Richardson and his circle of friends is a nice way to describe the surprisingly open, temporally extended process of collective writing that helped create such a capacious text as Clarissa, even while Richardson busied himself with closing off some of those openings.

But as I thought further about the characteristic forms and genres of the Enlightenment, I also remembered many of these writers' elaboration of forms and genres at the other extreme: the periodical essay, the dictionary entry, the individual letter, or Fielding's and Sterne's chapter divisions. All of these indicate a mastery of the short form as it aggregates into something larger, or perhaps even when it doesn't. Addison's, Hume's, and Johnson's essays, for example, are wonderful examples of concentrated yet accesible thought, lucid largely because of their brevity and suggestiveness.

I know from my own experience that the shortest forms teach the best, because they fit snugly within our 14 week semesters. But is it possible to give students a deeper sense of premodern reading practices, which must have given at least some people the leisure to read and reread books on the scale of Grandison and Clarissa, not to mention the Decline and Fall? And what are your favorite examples (teachable or not) of the encyclopedic or essayistic writings of the long eighteenth?

DM

Open ASECS panel, open tenure-track position

2006-09-15T16:22:00.000-04:00

I just ran into David Richter in the hallway here at the CUNY Graduate Center, and he claims there are still open spots on the "Menippean Satire" panel. Please contact him at the email address below with proposals.

“Menippean Satire: New Approaches” David H. Richter; E-mail: drichter at nyc.rr.com

Since arriving within the literary lexicon through the theoretical work of Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippean Satire has proven to be a term of flexible application. What it means depends on what work it is called on to perform, and it has functioned in a variety of critical approaches to the literary history of the long eighteenth century. Papers invited on Menippean Satire, especially on the interaction of theory and literary history. Respondent will be Professor Howard Weinbrot of University of Wisconsin at Madison, author of Menippean Satire Reconsidered.

I have also heard from Jon-Christian Suggs that the John Jay College of Criminal Justice English Department is looking to hire a tenure-track faculty member in eighteenth-century literature. Ideally, they'd like someone whose interests include law, but they will happily consider candidates who concentrate on other topics. Personally, I'd also add that this job is great for anyone looking for a small, friendly, collegial department that also provides nearly limitless potential for contact with other schools, as part of the City University of New York. Also, CUNY students make up one of the most truly diverse populations anywhere on the planet, and teaching them is often a great pleasure. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about CUNY, but also send a letter of inquiry to Prof. Suggs (jsuggs at jjay.cuny.edu), who would be happy, I'm sure, to describe the position more fully.

Royal Society Journals Online

2006-09-15T14:55:00.000-04:00

[Xposted to my blog]

In case any of our readers does not subscribe to C18-L:

Over 340 years of landmark science available for first time: "The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period" (heads up from Kevin Berland at C18-L).

Teaching Students to Use the Library?

2006-09-14T12:41:00.000-04:00

This may seem like a bonehead teaching question/anecdote, but I was teaching my undergrad Intro to Lit Studies course yesterday, and I brought them to our (recently renovated) library for their usual "how to use the library resources" presentation that our librarians very helpfully provide here.

At the beginning of her little talk, when the librarian presenting asked my class how many had used the library catalogue before, a little less than half raised their hands. This was a little surprising to me, because these were supposed to be (entering) English majors. Presumably they'd been asked to do research papers in other classes, English or otherwise. Have they been writing papers using materials entirely from online sources? (my suspicion from listening to their questions about online sources) Or had they never done their own research, and done essentially prefabricated topics? Or had they never bothered to use the web catalogue before, and simply hunted around until they found what they needed? It was hard to tell.

The University of Houston is a commuter school, and the students who work are necessarily zooming on and off campus all day, so I'm not surprised that they may not have time to explore the libraries. But it seemed to me that it would be hard to be an English major in the traditional sense of the term, or to do research of any kind, without having some familiarity with a library. But I could be wrong about this.

So how many of you take the time in your classes to show students how to use their library resources, or to do the kinds of research necessary for research papers or projects? Do you think this kind of training or experience is important for the teaching you do?

DM

How We'll Read McKeon's Secret History, Oct. 3-5

2006-09-13T11:08:00.000-04:00

Hello all,

Well, I checked out my library's copy of McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity, which we'll be reading Oct. 3-5, and discovered that it's . . . . really, really big. And heavy. And heavily footnoted. Frankly, I thought it merited a quarto printing with a nice leather binding, though that might have raised the price a bit too high. But you get the idea.

Here's the suitably monumental webpage from Johns Hopkins, with some early blurbs.

Undaunted, though, I'm getting ready for our Collective Reading, which I think we'll need to divide up to make sure the whole thing gets discussed in a reasonably comprehensive way across the three days of discussion. Each respondent will kick it off with a mini-essay about the segment under review, and then others will be able to follow up. Michael will definitely come in on the last day, and might be able to take up points earlier on in discussion, if his schedule permits.

I'm having trouble pasting the Table of Contents pages (Carrie, help!), but you should be able to find them via this link to Amazon.com.

What you'll find is that Michael has conveniently divided his book into three parts, following his Introduction. The first, "The Age of Separations," runs pp. 3-322; the second, "Domestication as Form," 323-468; the third, "Secret Histories," 469-718. We'll focus on one segment at a time on October 3, 4, and 5th.

Though I haven't gone very far, the first part seems to engage with the debates over the public sphere and public opinion we've discussed here, the second seems to deal with questions of genre, and the last with that peculiar early modern genre, the secret history in all its variations.

I look forward to hearing from all of you about this very interesting book.

Thanks,

DM

Clarissa's Anger

2006-09-11T22:31:00.000-04:00

Carrie's post about emotional responses to literature has made me reflect a little about why I value Richardson's depiction of the passions, and it brought home to me one of Richardson's peculiar gifts: portraying moral indignation, which in Clarissa's case never devolves into an inarticulate rage, but instead focuses itself into a merciless and clear-eyed view of her opposition, in all its weakness and selfishness.

Here's a passage that caught my eye while preparing my first Clarissa class this past week. I don't think I ever noticed it before, but it seemed this week like a remarkable record of C's discovery of her own resolve to defy her family. It happens in Letter 20, just after Mamma Harlowe begs her to obey her and her father, and to follow their direction by marrying Solmes straightaway, to prove the freeness of her heart from Lovelace.

Affected by my mamma's goodness to me . . . I could not but wish it were possible for me to obey. I therefore paused, hesitated, considered, and was silent for a considerable space. I could see that my mamma hoped that the result of this hesitation would be favorable to her arguments. But then, recollecting that all was owing to the instigations of a brother and a sister, wholly actuated by selfish and envious views; that I had not deserved the treatment I had of late met with; that my disgrace was already become the public talk; that my aversion to their man was too generally known to make my compliance either creditable to myself or to them, as it would demonstrate less of duty than of a slavish, and even a sordid mind, seeking to preserve its worldly fortunes by the sacrifice of its future happiness; that it would give my brother and sister a triumph over me, and over Mr Lovelace, which they would not fail to glory in; and which, although it concerned me but little to matter on his account, yet might be attended with fatal mischiefs--And then Mr. Solmes's disagreeable person, his still more disagreeable manners, his low understanding . . . . And as Mr. Solmes's inferiority in this respectable faculty of the human mind . . . would proclaim to all future, as well as present observers, what must have been my mean inducement--All these reflections, which are ever present with me, crowding upon my remembrance: I would, madam, said I folding my hands with an earnestness that my whole heart was engaged in, bear the greatest tortures, bear loss of limb, and even of life, to give you peace. But this man, every moment I would at your command think of him with favor, is the more my aversion. You cannot, indeed you cannot, think how my whole soul resists him!--And to talk of contracts concluded upon; of patterns; of a short day!--save me, save, oh my dearest mamma, save your child, from this heavy, from this insupportable evil!-- (p. 111, Penguin edn.)

For me, the remarkable thing about this passage is the slow burn that builds just after the silence (or stalemate) shared by mother and daughter, a silence immediately followed by the daughter's increasingly resentful memories of her previous unjust treatment. Most intriguing is C's awareness of the public nature of their fight, which convinces her that she would lose face if she capitulated to her brother and sister. C's exemplarity is her counterpart to Lovelace's notions of honor: it is a form of social obligation, obliging her to behave a particular way to preserve her own reputation. It is this secure knowledge of her exemplarity that encourages her to defy openly her mother's wishes, even as she begs like a child for her mamma's protection. From the very beginning of this remarkable paragraph, the scene tracks both characters through an extraordinarily varied set of moods.

This is what I was talking about when I said that emotional responses in scenes such as these inevitably entangle us in ethical questions: how is Clarissa to act, if she is not to behave in a sordid, slavish manner? Could you even begin to distinguish between the emotional and critical in writing about such a scene?

What do you (meaning all you odd ducks out there) think?

DM

Michael McKeon Collective Reading scheduled for October 3-5

2006-09-09T12:45:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to report that we've confirmed Michael McKeon's participation in our first Collective Reading, for October 3-5. Carrie and I will prepare responses to post on the first and second days of discussion, and I'm hoping to get at least one or two more guest respondents for the event. Michael has graciously agreed to respond to our discussion, and is looking forward to this opportunity to discuss his new book, The Secret History of Domesticity (Johns Hopkins, 2006). Thanks once again to Kathy Alexander at JHUP for helping us set this up.

We are planning to make this a regular feature on this blog, so that we can spotlight important new books in eighteenth-century studies.

Since we still have slots available, if you'd like to be one of our guest respondents, please contact me offlist at dmazella@uh.edu. And please continue to write in with suggestions for other books to read this year.

Please feel free to cross-post this announcement to any other listservs or forums that you think would be interested.

Best wishes,

DM

Why do we prefer one historical interpretation over another?

2006-09-07T12:39:00.000-04:00

Miriam's post about Cowan and Habermas, as well as Jen's earlier post about Watt and other theorists of the novel, made me wonder about a fundamental aspect of our scholarly practices: why do we prefer one interpretation over another?

We often talk one interpretation "winning out" over others, or of one historian or critic emerging as the "standard account" over the claims of rivals, but we rarely analyze this process of persuasion hardening into institutionalization. (Offhand, I can think of Fish, or Kuhn, or maybe Samuel Weber, but it's surprisingly hard to think of examples)

One interesting writer on this question is F.R. Ankersmit, whose Narrative Logic (Martinus Nijhoff, 1983) I've been working through lately.

FRA distinguishes between the internal and external questions provoked by historical narratives: internal questions are "posed only on the basis of something mentioned in the [narrative]; [while] "external questions" may be formulated from any conceivable perspective" (30). FRA talks about the common scholarly situation in which two competing interpretations of the same subject-matter come about, "the first giving a satisfactory answer to all its internal questions while avoiding all the important questions that can be asked on the subject-matter, whereas the other answers at least a number of these questions, although sometimes unconvincingly."

FRA's example is the historiography of the persecution of witches. He describes how the 19c historian Lecky blamed the witch burnings on the stupidity, meanness, and superstitiousness of the medieval clergy. Keith Thomas, on the other hand, developed an entire causal argument about medieval superstition and the process of demythologization of Catholic dogma (30-1). Obviously, Thomas's explanation raises all sorts of new questions about what this "demythologization" entailed, but we nonetheless prefer the account of Thomas, which cannot resolve many of the issues it raises, to Lecky's. Though Lecky's account can answer its own internal questions more persuasively than Thomas's, it does seem to isolate witch-burning too much from other issues that remain external to its argument.

I think FRA's example helps explain how the broader explanation sometimes wins out against the narrower one, if we feel that the narrow explanation doesn't explain enough, or doesn't interest us in pursuing it further. It's hard to see, for example, how one could extend Lecky's explanation with further research.

So does Ankersmit's account of competing historical interpretations seem accurate to you? Is this why we still read Habermas or E.P. Thompson, even after others have written books on the subject-matter they helped to establish? What do you think?

Dave

Emotional responses to literature and scholarship

2006-09-07T12:19:00.000-04:00

Bill Benzon at The Valve has an interesting post up about "tears and laughter" as critical responses to literature. His own post was inspired by Laura Carroll's answers to a "Name a Book that . . ." meme in which she gave Jane-Austen-only answers to questions like "One book that made you laugh" and "One book that made you cry." Benzon feels like laughter and tears have little to do with his own critical work, but he wonders how much others think about emotional response as a part of their work.

I suggested, in my comment there, that this seems to be a common and explicit part of much literary and historical study in our period. I thought, first, about Jim Chevallier's post about the "almost infantile pleasure" and excitement of the eighteenth century, and Sharon Howard's post expressing genuine thrill in the face of so many wonderful, individual, untold stories in her work on plebian and criminal accounts. For me, as I've said before, the eighteenth-century novel surprised me by being not just "interesting," but deeply moving, emotionally, and genuinely entertaining.

In conversations with other people who teach eighteenth-century texts, I've heard almost universal agreement that it is an especially difficult era because the authors seem to expect that readers develop sympathetic emotions in order to understand the moral or intellectual arguments. That is, the feeling comes before the understanding, just as Hume suggests it does in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Those who don't empathize, laughing or crying along, seem not to understand what the author is getting at. Those who do can't understand why the other half of the class is so sullen and silent.

Last semester, I went to a wonderful talk by Prof. Carrie Hintz of Queens College on her research into Restoration-era spousal biographies. Her talk was extremely detailed, learned, and analytical, meeting every criterium for an excellent intellectual exercise, but, at more than one point in the talk, she brought up how personally moved she was by reading these works, that it had a similar effect on her as watching a romantic dramatic movie. No one would suggest that her emotional investment could have compromised her work, which was so clearly excellent, and yet that comment certainly made everyone sit up in their chairs. I remember hearing many of my fellow grad students approach her afterward to say things like, "This is why I study Cavendish! She makes me excited to be alive!" It was liberating to hear a role model speak so earnestly about emotional response.

I've noticed that other eighteenth-century scholars often talk about this personal, visceral, emotional reaction quite freely around others working in the period, but to do so in "mixed company" often comes out sounding like an admission of guilt. Are we embarrassed by our emotional investment in the texts? Scholars of other periods seem to worry that this emotional investment may spoil analysis, but we seem to take for granted, as a discipline, that Clarissa makes us gasp and cry and Evelina makes us wince and laugh. I even feel that my understanding of Samuel Johnson's aesthetics has improved with the refinement of my emotional sensitivity to reading.

And I've begun to bring this deeply visceral kind of interpretation to works in other periods as well. While discussing Donne with my class yesterday, I kept trying to talk to them about why the Holy Sonnets give me goosebumps, and how deeply shocking and blush-producing I find his elegy "To His Mistress Going to Bed." I felt like they were thinking through the poems, but a little shy or unpracticed at feeling through them, which, biased as I am to the connection between the two, I hope to be able to urge them to do.

Are we just odd ducks? Is it that there is such a clear Humean association between emotional sensitivity and moral understanding? Is it that there is a deep suspicion in current scholarship of the possibilities of individual emotional response as interpretation? Do you find that your treatment of the emotional content of texts changes either with the period of the work or with the company you're keeping?