Category: Reading

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The Scholar between (The Limits of) Life and Politics

This year, I went vegan. This past week, the ethical and environmental consequences of my veganism became profoundly challenged. In what follows, I use my experience as a scholar invested in animal studies and animal rights to begin exploring the meaning and tensions involved in the cultivation of an orientation where scholarship and the politics of everyday life become intertwined. I do so neither to laud myself, nor to assert the necessary salience of my concerns per se. The ground I’m on is unstable, supported by monocrop farms, and made possible by the production of GMO plant foods. My interest here is in locating a nexus of potentiality and tension. I look to ask and get feedback on how to grapple with a set of social circumstances that constitute a horizon that delimits the desired results of the changes one wishes to contribute.
Increased work in areas of intersection between the history of art and methods of animal studies led me to a new ethical orientation. Artwork to which I’m drawn, by artists from Hogarth to Blake in the eighteenth century, to Matthew Barney in the twenty first, frequently thematize the position nonhuman species occupy as within a realm of moral rights. I realized that if I accepted such a thematic interplay as valid, I was therefore impelled to oppose the commodity status of other animals as machinic apparatuses of culture transmute them into objects of exchange-value (e.g. meat production) and use-value (e.g. dairy milk production). I had been a vegetarian for more than a decade. But the repetition of intellectual engagement with a view towards these issues crystallized my commitments to animal rights at a higher level of intensity. My life trajectory prior to the academic world drove this component of my research commitments; my research commitments came to deepen and transform the political aspects of my life commitments. A circuit was formed, whereby life, scholarship, and politics might form a mutually illuminating constellation of shared concerns and pursuits. I ultimately came to a conclusion. I could not continue to pursue scholarship that seeks to place human beings in an equitable relation to other animals, while at the same time continuing to occupy a privileged position in consuming animal products.
Yet, this space quickly appeared to me to be much more complex than I had anticipated, the way forward more convoluted. This was brought to an apex point for me during a recent meeting of the Chicago Animal Studies Workshop. There, Alice Kuzniar of the University of Waterloo led a wonderful meeting on writing she is doing on the Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2005 film Our Daily Bread (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Still from Our Daily Bread (2005), dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter. http://www.ourdailybread.at/jart/projects/utb/images/img-db/1132770640350-498×280-top-left.jpeg

The work completely cut across the very sense of self-accomplishment I experienced upon going vegan. What is deeply devastating about Geyrhalter’s film is that it so profoundly juxtaposes the means of techno-agriculture production relative to animal and plant life alike. Geyrhalter’s film alternates between settings that show animal and plant life being turned into commodities by like means of production. One scene shows dairy cows being forced onto a carousel that automatically moves them into position to be mechanically milked. The sounds of automation disturbingly define the sonic space. In another, the camera reveals a greenhouse where a nondescript crop is being grown under artificial light, with a machine moving under the lighting mechanism to water the plants. They won’t see actual sunlight until they depart to be sold. Similar sounds of robotics comprise the aural background of both scenes of the film. One is stunned into the realization that advanced industrial agriculture forms a horizon within which one is situated, irrespective of whether one consumes animal products like milk, or not.
And in this regard, I was astonished by the extent to which the filmmaker’s work stages what the romanticist Forest Pyle has recently identified as a radical aestheticism operative across romantic and post-romantic art. In this mode, the very ethical valences of the artwork become undone by its operations. Introducing the idea in Art’s Undoing, Pyle first observes that in “the broadest sense an aestheticism can be attributed to a text when the performance of its aesthetic reflection (which is necessarily a self-reflection) effectively severs the relationships (whether analogous, homologus, preparatory, supplementary, or complimentary) between art and knowledge by subsuming the latter into the former.” He goes on to assert that a text might “be understood as succumbing to a radical aestheticism the moment it finds itself and its representations of the aesthetic at its vacating radical.” The corresponding implication is that a “radical aestheticism offers no positive claims for art (either those based on ethical or political grounds or on aesthetic grounds)” and becomes “a kind of black hole from which no illumination is possible” (4). The logic of aesthetics Pyle describes, indeed, deconstructs the very possibilities of ethical movement or imperatives to be derived from a work of art, like that of Geyrhalter. The work of art’s aesthetic performance of itself radically collapses conditions for positive formulations of knowledge.

Geyrhalter’s film instantiates precisely these conditions of collapse. In Our Daily Bread, the dispersion of productive modes across animal and plant food cultivation leaves the viewer with questions regarding the very efficacy of a dissenting position that would oppose the contemporary food industry. If one’s consumption of plant foods, to the exclusion of animal ones, leads to the increased utilization of artificial environments for the growing of genetically modified crops, is the situation for plants any less perverse and cruel than that of animals raised for slaughter, milk, and clothing? What is the way forward, when one can begin to become clear on some aspects of the system, but is interpellated in such a way that the path forward is seemingly obscured by a horizon of production that appears to have always already enfolded potential directions of opposition and critique?
 

Works cited

Pyle, Forest. 2013. Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism. New York: Fordham University Press.

 

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Quarterly Editor's Note: To Spring

“Turn thine angel eyes upon our western isle
which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring”
-William Blake, “To Spring”
How true Blake’s words ring for this Chicagoan continuing to warm following the coldest winter on record. And so I write to wish all involved in the romantic studies blog(e)sphere a very collegial start to spring! Unsurprisingly, over the last few months, NGSC authors have continued to produce innovative work at a highly energetic pace. In what follows–and in my final such post of the year–I look back at some of what I found to be among the more incisive thoughts and ideas disseminated on the NGSC blog from January through April. NGSC authors wrote on topics of critical importance to a range of our constituents across the humanities (and beyond), covering such subjects as collaborative modes of engagement, the process building a trajectory of thought and insight between one’s undergraduate training and studies at the graduate level, to the place of economics and literature. We also published advice from established scholars in the field on preparing for comprehensive exams. The winter writing season was an important one for the NGSC.
The start to the year saw the publication of the blog’s first collaborative post, composed by Arden Hegele, artist in (e-)residence Nicole Geary, and myself on Romanticism and Geology. The piece took the form of a free flowing conversation, and ended up centering on how the material forms and discourses surrounding geology become factors of both romantic literary and contemporary art production. This allowed connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and literature to become visible for us, particularly as creative investments in geology inform shared concerns with respect to art and politics. At an especially illuminating juncture in the dialogue, Arden acted as interlocutor for Nicole with the question of how she sees “geologically-inspired works of art,” including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, as “engaging with the materiality of literary texts.” Nicole, in her response, connected geological form with the materials of textual production, observing that its “remarkable when you come upon stacked strata in the field and see rocks lined up like books on a shelf.” Importantly–and this accounts for one reason I find Nicole’s work as a sculptor and printmaker so fascinating–Nicole draws our attention so effectively to the way in which the earth itself comprises a geological field of signification to be made legible. Yet, like any text, it resists complete interpretation, offering breaches, lacunas, and other absences of meaning. “Volumes go missing,” Nicole reminds us. Excitingly, the series will be continued in May with a piece on the close reading of anatomical texts by Arden, NGSC Co-Chair, long time blog contributor, and Gothic studies specialist Laura Kremmel, as well as the ASU19C Colloquium member and specialist on romantic ideas of the undead Emily Zarka. So, look out for that.
Likewise, on the collaborative side of things, newly minted Ph.D. Candidate Kaitlin Gowan (also of the extraordinarily enterprising ASU19C contingent) wrote a fabulous and timely post on life after exams. There Kaitlin shares how she overcame the challenges of composing her dissertation prospectus. In doing so she made the vital point that, when faced with a daunting writing exercise, we so often do best to proceed by working ideas out out loud, with our colleagues. If, as Kaitlin reminds, our work depends on the passion we bring to it, and our colleagues prove crucial to reminding us of the enthusiastic group of scholars we’re part of as romanticists, the simple act of talking becomes a matter of tantamount importance for success in arriving at the point of being ABD.
In yet another innovative and inspiring post on the methods of literary analysis, Deven Parker’s January piece looked at Media Archaeology. There Deven nicely highlights processes of intellectual expansion in precisely the sort of seminar (in her case, “Media Archaeology” led by Lori Emerson) one might think at first unrelated to one’s earlier period-based work. Deven takes a point of departure from media archaeology’s imperative that we “expose structures of power embedded within the hardware of modern technology, revealing the ways in which media exert control over communication and provide the limits of what can be said and thought.” The result Deven extrapolates is an impetus to consider “texts from the inside out.” In turn, we are to question what books “tell us about the cultural conditions and constraints imposed by the media in which they were (and are) written, manufactured, and consumed.” It seems to me that the move to consider contemporary modes of production, and the theoretical modes of discourse they generate, so frequently proves critical for thinking about one’s own scholarship, even if it is primarily concerned with earlier periods. In addition, I would very much like to hear more from those of you reading the blog on what modes of contemporary media you enjoy thinking about, and the theoretical frameworks you utilize to do so.
Equal in brilliance for its bringing of the interdisciplinary to the fore of the blog, Renee Harris in a March post on “Use Value and Literary Work” zeroed in on how interests in romanticism and economics prove mutually illuminating. In a show of how the milestones in a graduate program lead one to the ideas that sustain important long-term work, Renee shared her justifications for her chosen comprehensive exam lists. At a key point, Renee contends that “The writers we study desire a lasting cultural influence. They seek to shape and correct, to play a significant role in cultural formation and the national story. I argue that this desire to influence and make a mark is a symptom of economic insecurity.” Indeed, it would seem that we need to understand to a much larger extent than we do the way in which such a bourgeois condition of pragmaticism informs the conditions of production with which we are concerned in the nineteenth century. I can’t wait to see how Renee will light the way to precisely this important frame of reference.
Last, on a similar front, blogger and interviewer extraordinaire Jennifer Leeds compiled words of wisdom from five scholars in our field on preparing for comprehensive exams. Perhaps the best of which comes from the medical humanities scholar Brandy Schillace, currently at Case Western University. Dr. Schillace made the salient point, which she was led to by her studies in theology, that “disciples ‘not worry’ about what they would say in advance. When the time came to speak, they would.” While I can only admit to my own experience in this regard, too often I feel as though I attempt to plan everything I say in advance, particularly with regard to my qualifying exams. This usually leads to unnecessary anxiety and less than fulfilling results. Hence, I find Dr. Schillace’s rejoinder a great one. We spend a good deal of time with ideas. Why wouldn’t we be heartened to know, and be confident that when we need them, the ideas will be there.
And with that I can sincerely say I look forward to another quarter of writing on the blog!
 

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Advice: Five Scholars on Comprehensive Exams

Constructing comprehensive exam lists is no easy feat. A friend of mine compares the process to building a personalized obstacle course and then having to master it; after all, the texts that appear on your exams are texts that you have personally chosen. Another friend compares constructing exam lists to building a wish list; here are all the books and articles that I wish I had time to read (or re-read) earlier in my career. Whether you view exam lists as friends or foes, one thing remains certain: you must be aware of yourself as a scholar.
Several weeks ago, I read Renee Harris’ thoughtful how-to on running the comprehensive exams gauntlet. Harris’ article offered the very comforting reminder that even while we construct (and take) these personalized exams, we are never alone in the process. Beyond our supportive departments, committees, and mentors, there are always other people going through similar neuroses, struggles, and victories. And, consequently, there is a vast group of established scholars who have already gone through them.
In an effort to extend this conversation of how to approach such a daunting task, I’ve asked five established scholars across North America about their experiences taking and preparing for exams. What did they wish that they had known? What were they glad that they already knew? Below are their words of wisdom:

Dr. Brandy Schillace, Case Western Reserve University

I was standing in the stairwell, waiting to be called up to the defense. It’s hard to capture the tumult of emotion and anxiety… I felt I had dueling octopi in my stomach. I was terrified I’d say the wrong thing, or nothing at all in a fit of brain freeze. Then I remembered something. I’m Anglican, and coming from my studies of theology, I suddenly remembered the early charge that disciples ‘not worry’ about what they would say in advance. When the time came to speak, speak they would.
In that moment before defense, we are  ‘disciples’ of English studies and about to stand trial. But remember–we are also masters. We know our subject better than anyone, and possibly even as well as some on our committee. They are not judges; they are peers. We are not going to prove we belong; we are going to show we’ve belonged all the time.
I breathed a sigh of relief as I climbed the stairs… And I entered the room as a colleague. That’s what you are–colleagues in the making. Don’t be paralyzed by the exam. Don’t be cocky, either, but just remember: this is our job, it’s what we do. When the time comes to defend, defend you shall.
(Though I confess, praying never hurts)

Dr. Anne Stiles, Saint Louis University

1. Study several contiguous time periods. When I took my exams, I decided to focus on the Victorian period and the 18th century, but skipped the Romantic era. I definitely regretted it afterwards, especially since many jobs in my field are geared toward the “long nineteenth century.” If you’re studying two different time periods separated by a decade or more, remember that the meat in the middle of the sandwich is important, too!
2. Always carry around a book with you in case you have a few spare minutes for reading (while waiting in lines, for ex.).
3. Remember to read secondary criticism on the primary works you read, even if you’re not required to do so. This secondary criticism can help you tie together and better understand the works on your list, so you have more to say about them.

Dr. Richard Menke, University of Georgia

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently by students approaching their comps is whether they should “focus on breadth or on depth” in their preparation and in their exam answers themselves. My answer may sound glib and unhelpful, but it’s really intended to be neither of these: “Both.” What I mean is that they should be ready to frame their deep, specific answers in terms of a broad sense of genre, history, context, ideology (and so forth). But they should also make sure that when they find themselves articulating their broad understanding of the field, they offer a sense of how they could add details to flesh out and add nuance to their responses.
This dual focus can help students offer successful exam responses that set up useful follow-up questions, since examiners will often pick up on these suggestions in an oral exam, for instance. But I’m convinced that it can also do something more. Rarely in our careers do any of us have the chance (or the obligation) to read extensively and promiscuously across our fields, as we are asked to do for our exams. So preparation for the comprehensive exams represents a chance to charge your intellectual batteries in a special way, to gather some of the knowledge, the theories, and the hunches that can help propel years of thought. As students are studying for their exams, they should work from specific texts and problems, to patterns that link them into networks of relationship, to larger themes and ideas. They should see their own knowledge and understanding in relation to the shape of their field, and should be ready to articulate the significance of their ideas by discussing their connections to these wider intellectual contexts. After all, that’s just what they’ll need to do in their own scholarship, as they present their deep research and argue for the breadth of its intellectual significance.

Dr. Anne Mellor, UCLA

The only suggestion I have is to know everything that is in my anthology, Mellor and Matlak, BRITISH LITERATURE 1780-1830. That will familiarize you both with the canonical and the newly-added-to-the-canon texts, as well as their historical contexts.

Dr. David Sigler, University of Idaho

The exam year is the best experience you’ll ever have in this profession, and probably in your life. If the listmaking and reading and examining feel traumatic to you or even merely stressful, be comforted to know that this is the least traumatic phase of your whole long career to follow, and that the memory of its pleasures will compensate you during the decades of anxiety to come. Just by doing all that reading all day every day for about ten months, and reading super-carefully so as to file away all of the details, you really do become an expert in the field and begin making connections, text to text, that spark a million ideas. Everything begins to relate to everything else, like you’re Coleridge or something. I read for months with a kitten, Eloise, often aloud—and when I see Eloise today, ten years later, we both know that we read a whole lot of stuff, very intensively, together. It’s solidarity and belonging one is building, then. Reading for the exams was, no doubt, the best intellectual experience I’ve ever had.
Making the lists is like making a mixtape, and thus when they’re poorly constructed one’s deficiencies are exposed. Mixtapes were a technology of the late twentieth century. I worry sometimes that scholars of the most recent generation are at a considerable disadvantage in the list-making, having never made anything but playlists. You want to show that you appreciate some delightful neglected corners of your field and also aren’t afraid of the greatest hits. Everything should be selected to demonstrate one’s immaculate and capacious taste. I had all kinds of Joanna Southcott on there, and Mary Prince, and The Writings of the Luddites, and the Marquis de Sade, and some early Felicia Hemans from before she sold out (The Domestic Affections). I went with The Last Man instead of Frankenstein like it was no big deal. I know that none of those are obscure at all, but it felt that way to me at the time because my frame of reference was expanding so quickly. One covers a lot of ground and gets smarter. The experience was exhilarating for me, and it always is. My point is that mine was a really great Romanticism list, and I’m not sure anyone else really appreciated it properly. My advice, if you’re doing it now, would be to use an earlier, shorter version of The Prelude, as early and short as possible, because that’s a lot of time-spots to remember for ten months. Don’t put Night Thoughts or Political Justice on there, either—seriously just read them after your exams, or during your exam year on your own time if you must. You don’t want to be pressed on those hundreds of details. Finally, don’t argue with the DGS when s/he insists that you include Manfred on your list—it’s simply so delightful that you should definitely include it, even if you’ve already got Don Juan and Beppo on there—it’s not a burden to include it, I promise, and the arguing just makes you seem timid and unimaginative. I know you know that already.
 

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Jane Austen and Romantic Mortification

Perhaps surprisingly for its canonical status as a tale of romantic love, Pride and Prejudice (1813) is governed by many distinctly unromantic states of negative affect. Distress, embarrassment, depression, shame, and disbelief are all integral to Austen’s portrayals of character. But one emotional state stands out as being distinctively Austenian: mortification. Elizabeth Bennet is “most cruelly mortified” by her father; Kitty experiences “mortification” at the Forsters’ preferment of Lydia; Darcy feels “incredulity and mortification” at Elizabeth’s initial rejection, and later, “trouble and mortification” as he searches for the renegade Bennet sister in London; and even Miss Bingley “was very deeply mortified by Darcy’s marriage.” Most famously, at the scene of the Netherfield ball, Elizabeth’s “mortification” accrues with each outrageous Bennet performance, and she even enters into “dances of mortification” with Mr. Collins. The Austen reader might well ask, what is this state of mortification, and why is it such a key term for describing Austen’s characters?
As a synonym for silent humiliation, “mortification” has a particularly Romantic shade. The term had been used in Shakespeare’s plays, and by Swift in his “Drapier’s Letters,” but it appears considerably more frequently in the prose fiction of the early nineteenth century. Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) features its narrator, Frank Obaldistone, claiming that he is “Not mortified, certainly not mortified”; Amelia Opie’s short story “Mrs Arlington: Or All is Not Gold that Glitters” (1818) describes one character as “humbled, offended, mortified, and self-condemned”; and other works by Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, and Clara Reeve all feature mortification as a key term for describing the emotional plights of society heroines.  But “mortification” seems to be an especially potent term for Austen. In Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published together in 1817, the term appears at least 8 times, and Austen typically modifies it to increase its severity: Catherine Morland experiences “deep mortification” and “severe mortification” at a ball with Henry Tilney, while Anne Elliot, shocked by Captain Wentworth’s sudden appearance, “fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification” to his comment that her person is altered beyond recognition. As with Elizabeth and Darcy, both Anne and Catherine must experience mortification, and especially public mortification, as a key stage in their trajectory to marital bliss.
Where did Romantic-era mortification come from? Austen’s repeated uses of the term are fascinating, since “mortification” occurs much more often in non-literary Romantic fields.  Rather, the term could refer to a religious practice of personal deprivation in the interest of spiritual self-improvement: as Ezekiel Hopkins wrote in 1807, “THE GREAT DUTY OF MORTIFICATION” required personal penance, since “without mortification, no [after]life is to be expected.” And, as A Daily Exercise and Devotions, for the Young Ladies and Gentlemen (1816) suggested, “The constant exercise of mortification is another fruit of penance” and the young lady or gentleman in question might “draw” “vast fruit” from the spiritual exercises of personal deprivation, or even the “voluntary toleration of bodily pain or discomfort” (as the OED would have it).
More intriguing, though, was Romantic mortification’s medical sense, as the word for the necrosis of bodily tissue — that is, as gangrene. The vast majority of references to mortification during the early nineteenth century appeared indeed in this pathological sense. “Mortification” is a central heading in John Hunter’s seminal work on battlefield surgery, A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds (1794), and the term appears with great regularity in medical textbooks in the early 1800s. One particularly clear definition appears in Sir Robert Carswell’s Pathological Anatomy: Illustrations of the Elementary Forms of Disease (1838):

The term mortification is generally employed in this country to express the state which has been induced in a part of the body by the complete and permanent extinction of its vital properties. On the Continent, however, the term gangrene is employed to signify the same state, whilst in England it is more commonly used to denote the incipient stage of mortification … The extinction of the powers of life, the complete cessation of the circulation, and an entire want of sensibility, characterize the second or last stage of mortification, which is called sphacelus…

But what could the horrifying condition of gangrenous mortification have to do with Mr Darcy’s embarrassment? One place to look for an answer is in the medical notes of John Keats, literature’s best representative of Romantic medicine. In his Anatomical and Physiological Note Book (published 1934), Keats discusses the connections between aneurism and mortification, and — in a cautionary tale for graduate students — mentions how “Those who have been addicted to Study from Keeping up a continued determination of Blood to the Brain have often the Vessels of that part ossified,” making the scholarly brain “subject to mortification” even among “the Young.” As Keats noted elsewhere, mortification could also take place among those who “lead a life of Intemperance.” Thus, since one of the main ambitions of Pride and Prejudice is to temper the unrestrained outbursts of the romantic leads, it makes a strange sort of sense that their intemperance of character — their respective pride and prejudice — leads to mortifying social punishment.
Although he does not use the term “mortification” in his poetry (to my knowledge!), Keats, who himself experienced “occasional ridicule, & some mortification” as a result of his “Pride and conceit […] amongst mere Medical students” (in the words of his friend Henry Stephens), is perhaps the touchstone for Romantic embarrassment. As Christopher Ricks’s 1974 book, Keats and Embarrassment, discusses, “a particular strength of Keats is the implication that the youthful, the luxuriant, the immature, can be, not just excusable errors, but vantagepoints” (12). Austen, too, uses moments of mortification to give insight and perspective, and the embarrassment her characters feel is not the result of “excusable error,” but of betrayal by their biology (their desires, or, more often, their desires thwarted by their foolish relatives). Thus, it seems no coincidence that Mary Ann O’Farrell’s discussion of “Austen’s Blush” (1994), another important work on Romantic embarrassment, touches on the biological underpinnings of socially coded desire. The blush, which Austen associates explicitly with mortification (Catherine, for instance, displays a “blush of mortification”), is for O’Farrell a marker of the body’s involuntary expression beyond the socially regulated codes of signals: “Austen necessarily invokes that about the body which is most inimical to manners, what makes manners most vulnerable to disruption” (127).  Thus, in my view, the affect of shameful mortification in Austen’s novels arises from the tension between the socially appropriate suppression of desire (analogous with religious mortification), and desire’s rebellious expression in the outer tissue of the organism (similar to medical mortification).
Austen’s union of the two external mortifications in producing her characters’ affect of humiliation established a convention that extended later into the century, and an interesting point of comparison is Anne Brontë’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which uses mortification as a key plot-point. Helen Huntingdon mortifies her would-be suitor, Mr Hargrave: “I cut short his appeal, and repulsed him so determinately […] that he withdrew, astonished, mortified, and discomforted, and, a few days later, I heard he had departed for London.” Helen’s power to mortify figuratively seems also to result (indirectly) in the death of her abusive husband, Arthur Huntingdon, whose alcoholism has led to actual mortification. In his last days, Arthur experiences “freedom from pain” and “deadness to all sensation where the suffering was most acute”; Helen writes, “My worst fears are realized — mortification has commenced.” In contrast to the extremely painful affect of mortification experienced by Austen’s characters, Arthur Huntingdon’s mortification passes from the first stage, gangrene, into the painless, fatal stage of sphacelus. His death releases Helen from her personal mortification at his hands, and leaves her free to marry Gilbert Markham. As in Austen’s novels, mortification is a developmental stage through which characters must pass to reach their marital goals; but unlike Austen’s mortification, Brontë literalizes the experience into its medical form, offering a much grislier model of character shaping.
But even marriage could not keep the advances of mortification entirely at bay. Elizabeth’s vigilance in “shield[ing]” Darcy from her humiliating relatives culminates in her permitting him to speak only to “those of her family with whom he might converse without mortification.” Et in Austen ego — even at the satisfying end of an Austen novel, then, is the encroachment of gangrenous necrosis.
 

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Rethinking Romantic Media: Print Alternatives

While my research has thus far focused on Romantic print media, my recent foray into the world of media archeology has led me to search for alternative media that print obscures. In Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler confronts “the historian’s writing monopoly” (6) by arguing that print cannot adequately take into account oral and visual culture. Writing merely stores the “facts of its authorization” (7), while “whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters and ideograms” (6). Kittler points to photography and film as storage media that put an end to the monopoly of print by recording the images and noise that print filters out. And yet, for scholars like ourselves interested in the period that preceded these inventions, how do we uncover the alternative media that print obscures? In order to answer this question, I turn to two examples of performance-based media that much recent work has attempted to reconstruct: lecture and drama.
Reconstructing the Romantic lecture
On February 28, 2014, the University of Colorado at Boulder hosted “Orating Romanticism,” a series of speakers that included Dr. Sarah Zimmerman of Fordham University, Dr. Sean Franzel of the University of Missouri, and CU Boulder’s own Kurtis Hessel. While each speaker focused on a particular lecturer or series of lectures, all spoke about the challenges they face when attempting to reconstruct a medium that is inherently performative and ephemeral. Dr. Zimmerman explained that Romantic lectures were critical oral arguments shaped by participating auditors as much as speakers themselves. For example, when giving a series of lectures on Shakespeare’s characters at the Royal Institution, Coleridge frequently deviated from his notes and occasionally strayed so far from the advertised topic that auditors complained in their reviews. Other lecturers changed their topics according to the audience’s immediate responses, collapsing the time between composition and reception that characterizes print. Working with such a medium proves challenging, explained Zimmerman, because the lecture’s “authoritative text,” if such a thing exists, “lies at the midpoint that marks the exchange between performer and audience.” As an inherently performative media dependent on time, place, and audience, the Romantic lecture cannot be adequately expressed in print.

Surrey Institution, London, 1810. Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin. (Wikipedia)
Surrey Institution, London, 1810. Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin. (Wikipedia)

Facing this challenge in his work on Coleridge’s, Hazlitt’s, and Humphry Davy’s respective lectures, Kurtis Hessel explained that in order to reconstruct these events we’re forced to cobble together “texts” from various sources, including the speaker’s notes, advertisements, reviews, and writings of those who attended. And yet, cautioned Hessel, these sources are often unreliable indicators of what actually took place. Just because a lecture was advertised, for example, does not mean it was actually held. If ticket sales failed to reach certain quotas, the event was canceled. In addition, while some lecturers like Hazlitt published write-ups of their lectures following the event, the printed version does not necessarily provide an accurate account of the lecture itself. Although it’s tempting to treat lectures in the same way we treat texts, Hessel struggles against this inclination in his work. Rather than relying on an available text, he explained, we’re forced to construct one. While print continues to dominate our understanding of Romantic-era oral media, we should seek out as many diverse sources as possible in order to reconstruct these moments. The lecture itself exists somewhere in between.
Reconstructing drama and pantomime
Drama is a similarly performative medium that presents methodological challenges when reconstructing it in print. With the exception of closet dramas and other plays that were not intended for the stage, the majority of popular stage productions were written with performance in mind. Although we have scripts, stage directions, and other textual remnants of these works, it’s difficult to imagine what occurred at individual performances. In Coleridge’s highly successful drama Remorse (1813), for example, we know that audiences were enthralled by a spectacular incantation scene in which an altar goes up in flames to reveal a painting of the protagonist’s assassination. Yet no surviving versions of the text give any indication of how this effect was achieved. Instead, our best guess comes from a write-up in The Examiner that describes “the altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song,” that together produced “a combination so awful, as nearly to over-power reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses.” Though lacking in specifics, this description depicts the scene better than the play’s stage directions, which simply read “The incense on the altar takes fire suddenly, and an illuminated picture of Alvar’s assassination is discovered.” In cases where stage spectacle played an important role in a production, paratextual materials are often better approximations of performance than the text itself.
These materials become even more important in the reconstruction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pantomime, a form characterized by on-stage action rather than dialogue. When trying to reconstruct the text of Harlequin and Humpo (1812) for The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, Jeffrey Cox and Michael Gamer used manuscripts with short descriptions of scenes alongside audience programs and other detailed information, but it’s impossible to arrive at an “ideal text” when a performance has no words. In places where the manuscript had little detail, they looked for descriptions in newspaper reviews. One review reveals that an Indian boy performed impressive contortions and acrobatics for a good portion of Scene V, a sequence that isn’t mentioned in the manuscript and seems have been a last minute addition to the show. It’s the piecing together of these sources that gives us the closest possible approximation of the work.
Joseph Grimaldi as "Clown," an archetypal pantomime character. c.1810. Wikipedia.

Joseph Grimaldi as “Clown,” an archetypal character in pantomime, c. 1810. (Wikipedia)

Destabilizing print
Despite my desire to uncover alternatives to print media, to deconstruct Kittler’s “writing monopoly,” it’s obvious that print is all that remains of Romantic performance culture. And yet, in our efforts to cobble together “texts” of these lectures and plays, it becomes harder to uphold traditional notions of textual stability. Especially in instances where there are multiple versions with significant differences, books are characterized by variation, difference, and inconsistency rather than grand solidity and authority. While publishers tend to smooth over these ruptures in “definitive editions” of canonical texts, reconstructions of forms like lecture and drama refuse to lull the reader into a fall sense of continuity. The search for Romantic print alternatives, though perhaps futile, may lead us to a more nuanced understanding of the different forces at play within printed texts.

 

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Use Value and Literary Work: Poetic Identity in 19th Century Britain

I am a few days from submitting a full draft of my Ph.D. comprehensive exam rationales. These short written explanations/defenses of my lists are intended to help my committee see how I chose my texts, how I conceptualize the time periods, and what kinds of questions to pose in my oral exam next month.  No pressure, right?  I am not required as of yet to make groundbreaking strides in our field.  (I have four months until the dissertation proposal is due.)  For now, I am to demonstrate a confident knowledge of the area and its current critical debates.

And I must say, despite all odds: I am really enjoying this process.  I mean REALLY enjoying it.

Months upon months ago, I began designing my lists according to major themes in Romanticism and Victorianism.  I borrowed this approach from an old Victorian lit syllabus that divided our readings into the major debates of the period.  Luckily, the Victorian epoch already has names for many of these debates– we get “the woman question” and “the condition of England.” I started there and tried to work backward to see similar debates in Romanticism.  Not impossible, but I eventually abandoned these categories, finding many texts too difficult to compartmentalize.  Within and across the lists, I found too much resistance to these neat categories.

The porous boundaries between literary movements or cultural epochs are a consistent point of debate in literary studies. (This acknowledgment heads the disclaimer we sign upon entering grad school, right? “We all know this fact, but you, grad student, are responsible for challenging these textual boundaries in intelligent and original ways for the next six years”). The long-nineteenth century in British literature itself must expand at both ends to encompass a least a decade in each direction to make adequate sense in the ways we critics currently construct the period. And this is not a phenomenon reserved for the afterlife of each movement alone, but rather the writers and theorists of the Romantic and Victorian movements look backward and forward in attempts to situate themselves and their literature within a cultural narrative that shapes and is shaped by their work. Indeed, what I find definitive of the nineteenth century, a point of connection that unites the various authors and genres represented in my comprehensive exam lists, is a desire for clear situation within and beyond an epoch.

The writers we study desire a lasting cultural influence. They seek to shape and correct, to play a significant role in cultural formation and the national story. I argue that this desire to influence and make a mark is a symptom of economic insecurity. With an emphasis on practicality and pragmatism (the use-value of work) as the bourgeois class rises to influence across the Romantic and Victorian epochs, the “word’s worth,” if you will, of a man or woman of letters seems to require its own proof. This need to defend and define one’s usefulness in society and to posterity (on top of the need to prove one’s self within a chosen vocation, as with Keats, Hunt, DeQuincey and numerous women writers like Mary Robinson) creates a significant identity crisis that gets translated across the century into various points of cultural and historical contention.

"Work" by Ford Maddox Brown, 1865
“Work” by Ford Maddox Brown, 1865

John Guillory writes a compelling history of “use value,” how it was invented and how it comes to odds against aesthetic value in the early nineteenth century. I came to Guillory through Mary Poovey’s brilliant 2008 book Genres of the Credit Economy. Hers is a book you read and pine over, jealous you hadn’t written it first.  Of course the list of books I wish I had written has grown well beyond anything I could reasonably produce in a long academic career; nonetheless, I continue to drool and dream. Teasing out what Poovey calls a “double-discourse of value,” Guillory argues that aesthetic value depended on the emergence of “use value” as an economic concept in the late eighteenth century.  Looking to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Guillory states that use value was invented to discursively clarify the relationship between production and consumption. It seems the people—literary writers and theorists?—were uncomfortable with the affective motivation behind ascribing a product value. Under the increased pressure for utility and practicality, valuing a work of art because of the pleasure it brings seemed a tenable (at best) justification for the time and effort expended in producing and consuming it. Therefore, the discourse substituted in use value which seems to marry production and consumption and get rid of the warm, fuzzy emotional value of art.

At the same time, Literature with a capital “L” cannot become so useful as to be absorbed into other types of writing like economic, scientific, or political writing (here’s the heart of Poovey’s book– how the distinctions arose between the genres).  So here’s the rub—aesthetics branches off from economic discourse for the first time, reiterating that not all written products are works of art. But what’s more, the products that appear like works of art may not be.  Thus Literary writers define what is “fine art” and distinguish between types of imaginative production based upon their adherence to the definition (namely, a work should not call attention to itself as a commodity, so rule out popular works and works of “immediate utility”).

But does this dismissal of “immediate utility” give leeway enough for my argument that poets and novelists in the nineteenth century feel the need to prove their utility?  I say, absolutely yes.  In my own adaptation of this cultural narrative, this is the crux of poetic identity in crisis. Suddenly (or not so suddenly, really, but now of sudden we have the language to explain this phenomenon) literature’s worth can no longer be taken as indisputable fact.  Suddenly, artists must defend the cultural relevance of the work.  What work does Literary work perform? Ironically, Wordsworth’s Prelude (esp. the 1805 version) justifies his seemingly self-indulgent aesthetic exercise in tracing the development of the poetic genius as performing the cultural work of a natural philosopher or historian, as he uses himself as the case study of a mind in development during upheaval of the French Revolution. Similarly, guarding his work against accusations of sensationalism or shock value, DeQuincey justifies his Confessions as being a comprehensive (scientific?) study of the effects of opium consumption, adding the potential educational benefits his mistakes may provide for the reader.

Perhaps more interestingly, Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold seek to define a use value for the aesthetic products more obviously abstracted from immediate utility than Wordsworth’s or DeQuincey’s.  Here we have a sense of immediate cultural crisis—the moral fabric of society is degrading as the class boundaries seem to be dissolving, gender roles (especially in the literary marketplace) seem to be in flux, science is questioning what it means to be human (and to be particular kinds of humans, etc). Carlyle and Arnold foresee anarchy, and they don’t seem too extreme with these concerns.  Radical individualism, as Carlyle terms it “democracy,” erases the need for leaders to model correct behavior.  And what will we do without models?  How can we possibly be moral without seeing what morality is?  How can we be cultured if everything and everyone is valued equally?  Carlyle’s answer: heroes and hero worship.  And significantly, his heroes always have a poetic sensibility, that is when his heroes are not poets themselves. Likewise, Arnold famously writes that culture is the answer to anarchy. To read and see all the best that has been known and created–this will civilize and make moral the British populace in flux.

I can see these economic questions of “work” and “value” at the root of my original categories, the major crises of the nineteenth century in British culture.  I feel as though this framework lends itself to a discussion of so many topics in recent scholarship: mental science, gendered work (domestic novels vs. fin de siècle adventure novels; sensibility and sentimentalism; etc.), professionalization of bourgeois occupations, dissenting culture, the widening franchise, the bard’s role in nation-making and historical record, scientific advancement and religious doubt, etc.
All this to say, I am arguing a relationship between economic and social (class) change as the root of writers’ identities. I see the common thread between nineteenth century writers as their struggle to negotiate aesthetic vocations within a market and within a society that seeks a use value for all products (read utilitarianism, read Victorian work ethic, read rise of bourgeois values). Meanwhile every fiber of their beings wants to privilege fine art above products with an immediate utility. Fine art is for posterity, it is lasting and transcendent. Okay so “every fiber” is a gross overstatement, and my actual narrative challenges this art for art’s sake assumption. Ultimately, there is a real anxiety about whether literary work performs a cultural service, and these writers vie for recognition of their worth both personally and occupationally, both in the moment and in literary history.

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Running the Comprehensive Exams Gauntlet: A Hopeful How-To

I have spent the last nine months thinking about my Ph.D. comprehensive examinations, and, as of tomorrow, I am nine weeks away from THE day.  Yikes!  And since in my current stage of borderline freak out I can think of nothing else, I have decided to write a very practical how-to/how-not-to guide for comprehensive exam preparation.  Please learn from my colleagues’ and my experience and mistakes.  And PLEASE add your own suggestions in the comments below.  We grad students need each other’s support. I still have nine weeks, oh wise ones.  I welcome your advice and in return I give you mine.

A Young Girl Reading, or The Reader (French: La Liseuse)
A Young Girl Reading, or The Reader (French: La Liseuse), an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

To begin, let me describe the two comprehensive exam models I know from my Masters and Ph.D. universities.  Both universities position these exams as the transition between coursework and the dissertation.  At each university, students are tested over a group of lists specific to their areas of study, including primary texts of all genres and critical texts.  At my Masters university the exams were written.  Students prepared for the exams for an average of one and a half to two semesters.  The exam itself required students to write three 20+ page papers in response to the questions written by their committee (I believe the students have 4-5 questions from which they choose three).  You had 48 hours in which to complete the essays.  This style requires very organized and diligent note-taking, and communication with your committee members about types of questions to expect.  From here, you can begin drafting potential arguments to use during the exam days.
At my current university, the exams are oral. Three hours in a conference room at the mercy of five committee members. I’m reassured by my committee that the three hour exam is not so foreboding, but for dramatic effect and to garner your sympathy, I present it as an academic gauntlet. Four committee members are (roughly) in your area of study, and one committee member is recruited from a different department to ensure fair treatment and assessment of the tester. See? A gauntlet.
Students are to master three lists of texts (each of which is approximately three syllabi-worth of material) that cover our time period, an adjacent time period, and a list of our choosing (often a dissertation list, an author list, a genre list, or a theory list).  We are given three semesters in which to do this, but most students take only two.  My lists cover the long nineteenth-century with a decided focus on poetry and critical prose (though I do include novels as well).  I have a Romanticism list, a Victorian list, and a dissertation list, titled “Keats and the Cockney School.”  These lists are self-created with the help of your committee.  They must be approved, and you must provide rationales for them in the form of a 25 page document.
I did not get off to the best start in my studies. (Shhh! Don’t tell my committee!).  But after consulting with friends who had run the gauntlet and lived to tell about it, I developed a reading schedule, a realistic outlook on the process, and even an appreciation for this phase in my academic career.
So here’s a taste of what I have learned over the last few months:
Continue reading “Running the Comprehensive Exams Gauntlet: A Hopeful How-To”

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Interview: Dr. Judith Page and Dr. Elise Smith

Dr. Judith Page and Dr. Elise Smith’s article, “Writing a Book Together,” featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, documents their experience working on Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780-1870 across the disciplines and across several states. Page and Smith explain that from the beginning, they had two objectives: To bring together the disciplines of art history and English, and to find a topic that would yoke their “mutual love of gardening.” These two goals resulted in their brilliant argument, that “gardens provided women with a new language and authority to negotiate between domestic space and the larger world,” while it simultaneously “offered expanded possibilities that re-centered domesticity outward” (2).
Page and Smith’s friendship is partially rooted in gardening. In fact, one of Page’s first memories of their friendship is planting her first vegetable garden with Smith and her children. “Our children were also friends,” Page says. “They grew up together and thought of her as a second mother, so it made sense for us to want to do a book together.” In this way, Page and Smith’s book is more than a well-researched, fascinating study of women and gardens; it is a carefully constructed document between friends.

INTERVIEWER

How did you initially meet?

PAGE

We met each other as faculty members at a small liberal arts college, Millsaps College, where Elise still teaches. I taught for a long time until I moved to the University of Florida. I loved the kind of collaborations that can occur at a liberal arts college because you really are very connected to people in other departments […] We became good friends and realized that we shared a lot of interests. At first, we actually team taught together. […] We taught a couple classes on images of women in art and literature. We went from very early images through the twentieth century and mostly focused on European art.

SMITH

It was a big change for the two of us because although we already had a lot of teaching experience, at that point, it was always just us in our own classes, me, as an art historian, and her, as a literary historian. […] Thinking about women was the baseline for what brought us together from our various fields. Those courses were such fun to teach. I think it was marvelous for the students to have a way to see alternative perspectives, not just in what they read, but in seeing us with our different viewpoints there in the classroom. That really helped later when we came up with this idea of writing a book together. It was an important foundation for us in terms of thinking collaboratively.

INTERVIEWER

How was this project similar to or different from your other collaborative processes?

PAGE

I would say that the project is different from the collaborative project of teaching together because when you teach a course together, you have to sit down and shape the course and perhaps make changes as you go along. When you’re writing a book together, you really have to read the work, collaborate, change it, revise for each other, and we found that process worked really well. People joked with us and said, “You’re such close friends. Are you still friends after writing a book together?”

INTERVIEWER

How did you come up with your idea?

PAGE

I think it moved from that very early amorphous images of women to something that was much more specifically grounded in the garden and what we might be able to do with that […] I don’t remember what actually sparked the initial idea except our love for the garden and our interest in writing a feminist piece on the garden and our interest in women artists and writers, so it all just came together. […] This was after I had left Millsaps. I’ve been at the University of Florida for 13 years. We both had finished book projects. I had finished my book on Romanticism and Judaism and she had finished a book on the Victorian painter, Evelyn De Morgan, which was her first piece of work in the 19th century.

SMITH

One of the advantages of us not living in the same town anymore is that we’ve got a lot of emails that relate to the project. One dates back to August, 2003. I had written Judy an email at 1:16 in the morning. I started by saying that I had been trying to get to sleep and just wasn’t able to because my mind was full of thoughts about this book that we had begun to think about. Initially, we had been thinking very broadly and loosely about something relating to gardens and landscape issues in the 19th century.
In this middle of the night email that I sent to Judy, I was sort of moaning about this article that I was working on about Gainsborough […] and I said what was really getting me a lot more excited was the thought of working with her on 19th century women gardeners or rather women and gardens, since some of the women might not necessarily be gardeners themselves […] She responded that same night at 2:51 AM, which is kind of bizarre. And she said, “This is so strange because I’m sleepless in Gainesville and decided to get up with hot milk, dry cereal, and a computer check. I love the idea of focusing on women and gardens although we might find that pushing back in the 19th century could be interesting too.”
The time framing of the book—that may have been one of the hardest things for us to figure out, because, of course, there was only a certain amount that we could do. But, any time we got ourselves a tentative beginning and ending date, one of us would kind of stretch an elbow out and say “Oh, but you know, if we just go ten years further or ten years earlier, I could include such and such.” It really was not until late in the writing process that we finally settled on the framing device that we had.  I think it was, in part, some of the frustration that both of us felt at having to leave out some of the later 19th century stuff that got us going on our second project that we’re working on now.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell us more about working between the disciplines? Within “Writing a Book Together,” you touch upon the clash of verb tenses and working together to achieve a seamless writing voice–a “we” rather than an “I”.  What were some of your other struggles or victories? How did you approach them?

PAGE

We found it a very congenial process and almost always took each other’s criticism and felt that it was right. We’re coming from different disciplines. Elise is a trained art historian. I’m trained, of course, in English. […] There really were some funny moments in sharing our work where we would see different conventions that would guide us. For instance, in my previous books that were not collaborations with Elise, I had illustrations, and some of the illustrations were what she might consider to be decorative. In other words, I did not engage the illustration in the text. Elise’s ground rule was if you have an illustration in the book, you have to engage with it in the text. Of all the 75+, or however many it turned out, nothing was just gratuitous. We talked about each one of them. There was a purpose for having them. That is something that I really had not thought about before. When I wrote my book about Wordsworth and women, I had illustrative illustrations […] and I didn’t necessarily engage them. […] Some of the pictures of the home places I did talk about, but I didn’t have such a strict guideline that I was working with. I liked it. It makes a lot of sense and it’s a good way to justify the illustrations to your publisher.

SMITH

I was also particularly concerned about being sure that we incorporated images in all of the chapters, not just in the chapters that I was working on, and that we incorporated them in what I thought was a substantive rather than a relatively cursory or merely illustrative way. I wanted significant analysis as much as possible to be done with all of the images, rather than just having them there as an illustration on the page.

PAGE

There was that issue, and another one, which I also think is a disciplinary difference that we had. I’ll give you an example: I am the primary author of the chapter on Dorothy Wordsworth. That chapter had even more in it when I first shared it with Elise that was very speculative about Dorothy Wordsworth and her relationship to her brother. Elise wanted evidence. […] On what grounds are you making this statement? What can you point to? What evidence is there? I took it out when it was purely speculative and I didn’t really have the evidence. I worked according to that and I think it was good for me. It certainly made our writing more compatible because she is devoted to really careful scholarship and all of her evidence and references are very precise. It was a good discipline for me to have that because I think that we, as literature scholars, perhaps tend to have more flights of fancy and things that we can’t absolutely justify [with hard evidence], but that we still think we’re right.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell us more about your collaborative process?

PAGE

We were collaborating from the very beginning. As soon as we would write a chapter, we would share the chapter. We agreed from the outset that each of us would write four chapters. The book has eight chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. One of us drafted the introduction—I did—and one of us drafted the conclusion. Then, we each revised them, so they were all truly collaborative.
I also think that our voice is pretty close. […] Maybe someone who analyzed the chapters with some kind of technological program could tell there are certain ticks or ways of writing that are distinctive, but I think we’re actually quite close in our writing styles and I think that it made for a greater harmony in terms of the voice.

SMITH

We assigned ourselves key chapters to draft up and then we would send that draft to the other person. I’d send my draft to Judy and would get all kinds of responses from her and vice versa. Often, something that I might have been working on, for example, related to images, I realized didn’t really fit in my chapter anymore but could easily fit into one of Judy’s chapters as additional visual material […] or a literary passage could really fit well into one of my chapters, so that worked well in the later stages of drafting.

PAGE

We were also both committed to the “we”. We were committed to writing the book together, so it was something that we accepted. I know at one point, Elise said, “I feel really funny using the word “we” in the chapter on Dorothy Wordsworth. It’s so clearly your chapter. You’re the Wordsworth scholar.” There were moments like that where we both chuckled a little, but even the chapters […] where one obviously wrote more of that chapter than the other, at the end of our process, we ended up taking some things out of one chapter and putting it in another with no regard for who wrote the chapter originally. I would say our process, if I had to have a metaphor for what it was like, was like making a quilt. We got the parts, we thought of the chapters, and then we pieced things together in them, so it’s quilt making, if you think of quilt making as an organic process.

INTERVIEWER

In your book, you mention collected specimens, exotic flowers, and how “the microscope suggested a hidden life rich with possibility and meaning” (58-9). If we consider female botanists collectors, can we compare them to famous male botanist and collector, James Banks? Could they be following his example, set in 1771, when he returned from Captain James Cook’s first voyage to South America with samples in tow?

PAGE

Some of the women that we wrote about, for example, Agnes Ibbetson, who is a very accomplished botanist, did have an interesting system of categorizing and collecting in that sense, but we didn’t find this grand design of women as collectors in the sense of Banks or some of those great collectors and adventurers. […] It’s almost a kind of gendered distinction. Male adventurers have a strong desire to conquer and collect and to bring it all back as a part of the empire and put it on display in Kew and other gardens in Britain.
We found less of that in women writers and artists. We found more of an interest in teaching that a lot of this knowledge goes into an educational function […] That educational interest that is very strong, so that you find women who have great knowledge of different parts of the botanical world. That knowledge takes the form of dialogues between mothers and children and various kinds of scenes of instruction in books, so that the botanical knowledge is often put toward that kind of advancement of intellect.
That said, I just read Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things, which was published a couple of months ago. The main character is a woman botanist who has an amazing collection of moss and becomes an incredible expert. I was fascinated by the portrayal of this character not just because she was a collector and wanted to get to the heart of it, but because of what she saw when she studied the moss really closely under the microscope. Gilbert’s character demonstrated this notion that we see in Chapter Two, this discovery of this interior world, an amazing world that was represented when you could actually see into the life of this species, this plant. I think there was this sense of wonder in the world. A lot of women botanists write about wonder, often putting it in a religious perspective too.

INTERVIEWER

Interesting! You discuss the garden as a liminal space of education and exploration, especially for girls before they become women. Did the garden have the same erotic connotations as other well known liminal spaces of education and exploration, such as boarding schools?

PAGE

We do indeed focus on the garden as a place of exploration and education, a place where women and girls can extend their sense of themselves. […] The garden for both men and women always has this erotic charge. It makes me think about the Garden of Eden and all of those kinds of metaphors that go with that. The book is not comprehensive and we didn’t talk a lot about that, but if I had added another chapter, […] I would’ve loved to talk about writers in that context—one of them is Austen. I did a paper for the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice that just came out last year on the landscapes and estates and gardens. One of the things I talk about there is not the garden narrowly defined as a garden per se, but certainly the outdoor space and the outdoor world in Austen’s novels is a place of freedom. It’s a place where many of the really important scenes and activities take place and discussions between characters that are highly charged and couldn’t take place in the drawing room. They take place out of doors.
Think about the moment in Emma, at the end of the book, where Emma is described as hurrying into the shrubbery. She’s overcome in that moment. She’s recognized that, “I’ve loved Mr. Knightley all along—Harriet can’t have him because I love him!” And she’s pacing the garden, the shrubbery. In that moment, Mr. Knightley appears. That moment can only take place out of doors. It’s highly erotic, and Austen handles it so beautifully.

SMITH

I think that you can particularly see erotic fears perhaps most prominently and ironically in children’s literature–this fear of the children escaping past the wall and the kind of punishment, the literal and metaphorical fall, that these children might have if they climb up on top of the wall. And, of course, the idea of the fall takes on so much resonance symbolically. That could be read as sexual metaphor. I have not made that explicit in the chapter that I wrote, but I think it’s a really neat way of thinking further about that work.

PAGE

We describe this in the beginning of the book that we use the term garden very fully and loosely and we take in botanical writings, landscape, and a whole range of ways that people can engage with the natural environment in the book.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell us more about your next project?

PAGE

We decided that we loved writing this book together so much that we’re going to write one more book together. […] If critical books could have a sequel, I suppose it’s a sequel. […] What we found looking at the later 19th century is that if in this earlier period, we talked about the way that so many women writers and artists negotiate their relationship between the public and private, in the newer project, one of the things we talk about is an increasing professionalization of the way that women writers and artists talk about the garden, the garden as a potential profession. If women were amateur gardeners in the 19th century, and many of them did move into professional garden writing […] at the end of the 19th century, you have women thinking of themselves as professional writers, professional gardeners, and that there’s a kind of conjunction between women and the garden and women who worked in the city, New Women, if you will. The whole notion of the New Woman fits into this.
Some of the figures, for instance, that I’m interested in, begin to write important gardening histories. They see themselves as historians of what has taken place in the garden not only over the last century, but going back for many centuries. […] There are examples of women who have university educations and see themselves as historians of the garden. We’re going to look at some of those writers.

SMITH

Mostly, I’m working on the time between the very tail end of the 19th century through World War I. That’s where most of my stuff is leading right now. […] I’ve drafted a chapter on garden memoirs written by women who were gardeners themselves and were really thinking about how to create a space for themselves outside of the city. The city/country dichotomy is very important because many of these women travelled back and forth between their country retreat and the city. In fact, I’ll be giving a talk at the 19th Century Studies Association in Chicago in March, which is a conference centered on the city in the 19th century. I’ll be talking about these women in the country and the way in which they contrasted what they valued about their lives in the country, in their gardens, as opposed to what they saw as really problematic about the city, the noise, the dirt, and also the city as standing for some of the violence that they associated with the war torn years.
One of these garden memoirists wrote in defining this contrast between the city and the country, “Asphalt or turf? Pose or repose?” She was referring to the idea of the pose, the sort of artifice of the poseur life in London, as opposed to being able to let that all go when one is rooted in the countryside. That was a lot of fun for me to write. I hadn’t heard of a lot of the women before, but very few other people now have heard of them either. As an art historian, I’m finding myself pulled into text based writing and text based image making, because there is very little imagery involved as I dig into these memoirs and write about them. My other chapter, so far, is about an artist from the Bloomsbury group who knew Virginia Woolf. Her name is Dora Carrington. She was working in the 1910s and ‘20s before she committed suicide. She did a lot of paintings of the land around the three homes that she lived in. One was her childhood home and two were houses that she lived in with the Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey. I argue that these landscapes that she painted are really a way of attempting to make a psychological home base for herself because of the way she felt increasingly removed from friends and lovers, and even the actual homes themselves, which she didn’t own. […] She was afraid of being a hanger-on with Lytton Strachey. […] My next chapter will be on children’s stories and illustrations centered around Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, but I will also look into other children’s books written by women that deal with children in the garden in some way, which will be an extension from the chapter that I wrote about children’s literature in the last book. I’m not sure what my fourth chapter will be. That is sort of giving you an indication of how Judy and I are feeling our way into what we might want to write about.

 PAGE

I’m very interested in figures like Beatrix Potter and Vita Sackville-West, women who saw themselves in terms of a kind of mission that they had to revitalize the English landscape. Beatrix Potter is an example of someone who is best known as a children’s author. She wrote the Peter Rabbit books that we all grew up on. However, after she wrote the Peter Rabbit books and settled in the Lake District, she became a conservationist and someone who dedicated her life to the restoration of the countryside. […] Sackville-West wrote books where the garden features very importantly, but she also developed and designed with her husband and then worked in one of the most important gardens of the 20th century, Sissinghurst, which is still regarded as one of the great gardens in England. I’ll be looking at what the relationship between her life as an actual gardener and what she wrote about her gardening life. In this project, we’re also going to be very interested in looking at the effect of the First World War, but we’re going to take it through the Second World War and the effect of the war on the sense of the landscape, the place of the garden in the landscape, and women’s relationship to it in particular. One of the things that developed during the First World War is the Women’s Land Army, and women increasingly took the place of men as workers on the land as men were drafted into the army. Many of those women became committed to those skills and to that life, even after the war. Looking at those kinds of changes in how women contributed to the land and the landscape during the war years is something that we’re going to be very interested in.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any advice for scholars interested in collaborative work?

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I would say that productive collaborations arise from shared interests and passions, and when each contributor brings a different knowledge or disciplinary perspective to the mix. Once you get going on the collaboration, think of it like other relationships that always require give and take—and compromise.

SMITH

I think my main advice would be that you have to give up turf possession. That’s a good metaphor to use when we’re talking about gardening. You have to give up the sense of, “Oh, I’m an art historian, and thus what I write has to be situated in art history.” I learned long ago by coming to Millsaps and being the only art historian here for many years, to give up turf ownership of any particular period in art history because I teach from ancient all the way up to contemporary. […] Now, by working with Judy collaboratively, I’ve had to broaden out beyond being just an art historian to being a thinker about the world, open to all kinds of questions, and then following those questions to whatever kind of evidence might come to bear on those questions. I think about texts as well as images. That advice is important advice for any scholar in whatever field, whatever they’re doing – go where the questions lead you.

 
 
 
 

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Rethinking Romantic Textualities with Media Archeology

In my first post for this blog, I wrote about how my background in archeology influences my perception of texts as physical objects, and how I’d like to move towards an “archeological hermeneutics” that takes into account a text’s material conditions as contributing to its contents and their significance. Moving forward, I’d like to complicate our understanding of text-as-object by introducing what I’ve so far learned in my “Media Archeology” seminar taught by Lori Emerson. It came as a surprise to my family and friends that I enrolled in this course, because I tend to take classes that focus on the study of 18th and 19th century literatures. Although I won’t be reading any texts “in my period” for this class, I’ve found it has in fact supplied me with a variety of alternative methodologies for my Romantic-era research.
Although those who work in the field tend to resist a concrete definition, Jussi Parikka calls media archeology “a way to investigate the new media cultures through insights from past new media, often with an emphasis on the forgotten, the quirky, the non-obvious apparatuses, practices and inventions” (Parikka loc 189). We’re encouraged to take apart machines in order to understand how they operate, and in turn expose the conditions and limits of our technologically mediated world. Relying on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, among other texts, media archeologists expose structures of power embedded within the hardware of modern technology, revealing the ways in which media exert control over communication and provide the limits of what can be said and thought.
I find this way of thinking about the structures and limitations imposed by media particularly useful for the study of 18th and 19th century texts. Instead of thinking about how printing and publication practices give rise to individual texts, as I have in the past, I’ve started to consider texts from the inside out: what do books tell us about the cultural conditions and constraints imposed by the media in which they were (and are) written, manufactured, and consumed? Like the ASU Colloquium’s post, I wonder what three volume novels, for example, might tell us about communal reading practices and circulation of texts and, importantly, our modern reading practices in comparison. I’d hypothesize that circulating texts and libraries would contribute to communities of readers in which reading was, perhaps, a shared experience. In contrast, modern reading tends to be solitary experience which involves owning texts (especially when the library has only one copy of the book you need).
I’ve also found media archeology’s rethinking of linear time and notions of progress particularly useful and interesting. Collapsing “human time” allows us to bring together seemingly unrelated technologies for comparison and analysis. I’m thinking here of the Amazon Kindle and 18th century circulating libraries, which both create spaces for communal reading. In contrast to the private reading practices I described above, I think the Kindle – and specifically the “popular highlight” feature – presents an opportunity for readers to become aware of their participation in collective readerships. When you click on a pre-underlined sentence, it shows how many other people have also highlighted it. While at first I found this feature annoying – perhaps evidence of the private relationship I tend to have with books – I’ve begun to enjoy the way it makes me aware that I’m one of many readers who’s enjoying this particular text. Furthermore, I wonder if my newfound sense of collective readership would also give me a better understanding of Romantic-era reading practices that were likewise characterized by shared texts and mutual engagement. The ASU Colloquium posed an important question about whether we should attempt to read texts as their original readers would have; since many of us no longer have access to the original 3 volume novels and their circulating libraries, maybe we can gain insight into these texts and reading practices from the vantage point of our own collaborative technologies.
To close this post, I want to introduce one more concept from my media archeology reading that I’ve also found particularly applicable to the study of Romanticism: glitch aesthetics. Typically understood as accidents and hick ups within games, videos, and other digital media, glitch artists exploit them in order to “draw out some of [that technology’s] essential properties; properties which either weren’t reckoned with by its makers or were purposefully hidden” (McCormack 15). Again, media archeologists are concerned with exposing the power structures embedded in technologies, this time by giving us a peek of what lies beneath. While looking at glitch art, I couldn’t help but think of an experience I’d had in the British Library reading Keats’s manuscripts. I remember finding an additional verse to “Isabella: Or, the Pot of Basil” in George Keats’s notebook in what I think was Keats’s hand etched nearly invisible on the opposite page. Of course, this mysterious stanza threw a wrench in the carefully constructed argument I’d planned, and I had no idea what to make of it. Now that I look back on it, I’d like to think of that stanza as a textual glitch – it’s possible that Keats never intended for it to be read. Perhaps it had even been erased from the page. For me, this “glitch” reveals the textual instability of the poem and disrupts the sense of solidity and permanence with which I’ve come to regard Keats’s oeuvre.
I still have much to learn about media archeology and its methodologies (which I’ve certainly oversimplified), but I think this field could lead our work in Romanticism in new and exciting directions.
 

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The Romantic Poets' Travel-Guide to Italy

“Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) / Linking our England to his Italy!” Thus concludes Robert Browning’s masterwork The Ring and the Book (1868-69), a poem whose composition celebrates the longstanding artistic relationship between the two nations in the nineteenth century.
English literature is full of Italian journeys. There are honeymooners, though their marriages tend not to fare well (Dorothea and Casaubon; Gwendolen and Grandcourt; George Eliot’s own Venetian wedding-night debacle). There are ill-fated convalescents (Keats; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Milly Thrale; Ralph Touchett). There are traveloguing or scholarly visitors (Sydney Owenson; John Ruskin; Byron in his late Childe Harold phase). There are also exiles (Byron and the Shelleys). And—finally—there are Italians émigrés in England (the Rossettis).
In this post, I recommend some enjoyable and Romantically-informed travels in Italy—and invite you to contribute adventures of your own in the comments section!
Rome
Like the Romantics, you may find yourself exploring thousands of years of history with the help of a guidebook – perhaps Italy, written by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) in 1821. You might also consult Byron’s always entertaining prose. He wrote in 1817, “I am delighted with Rome—as I would be with a bandbox, that is, it is a fine thing to see, finer than Greece; but I have not been here long enough to affect it as a residence. [I have been] about the city, and in the city: all for which—vide Guide-book.”
But, apparently unsatisfied with the “Guide-book” in question, Byron developed his own vision of Rome in the fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, where he writes (with characteristic grandeur):
Rome—Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,
In the same dust and blackness, and we pass
The skeleton of her Titanic form,
Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm. (IV. 46)
and
Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery. (IV. 78)
Rome admired Byron back, and it comes as no surprise that the poet is omnipresent in the city. In the Villa Borghese, for instance, look for the Byron statue at the entrance to the park. This is a copy of the famous Thorvaldsen bust of the poet, for which he posed in Rome in 1817 (the original statue, refused by Westminster Abbey, is at Trinity College, Cambridge).
Even classical sites like the Colosseum can be seen anew through a Byronic lens. The poet devotes six stanzas to the gladiatorial games that took place in that “enormous skeleton” in Childe Harold, Canto IV, and finishes with this epic misquotation of the Venerable Bede:
“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls—the World.” (145)
Nearby, Trajan’s Column, now separated from the Colosseum and the Roman Forum by a Mussolini-era expressway, also gets the sublime Byronic treatment: “Whose arch or pillar meets me in the face, / Titus or Trajan’s? No—’tis that of Time…” (Childe Harold IV. 110).
Byron began writing Canto IV—the Italian leg of his peripatetic long poem—in 1817, at his Roman residence, Piazza di Spagna 66, which is located at the bottom of the famous Spanish Steps. The building now seems to be a dentist’s office—suitably befitting its red-tooth-powder-obsessed former resident.
Considerably more important, however, is Piazza di Spagna 26, a pink building across the square and directly next to the steps. This is now the Keats-Shelley House. Keats died here in 1821, and the building has since been converted into a museum celebrating the life and works of the second-generation Romantic poets, especially Keats.

Keats-Shelley House from the Spanish Steps
Keats-Shelley House from the Spanish Steps

The poet’s modest rooms, on the second floor, are particularly moving: on the wall is a brass plaque that commemorates his death, and the bedroom has been restored to its historical condition, including the original fireplace and period furniture. The museum displays many of Keats’s belongings and letters, and even his death-mask.
The Keats-Shelley House also boasts an excellent collection of over eight thousand volumes related to Romanticism, including many early editions, as well as plentiful (and sometimes disturbing) paraphernalia associated with the English poets. There are many well-preserved original letters in Mary Shelley’s hand. Look out for locks of hair belonging to Milton and the Brownings, and scraps from Byron’s red bed-curtains (dating to the night terrors he experienced during his marriage). Perhaps most uncanny is Byron’s wax mask, which he wore during the Carnival at Venice. You can even take a virtual tour of the Salone (the central room) without the cost of airfare to Rome.
Shelley’s impassioned response to Keats’s death in “Adonais” (1821) leads us to our final Romantic site in Rome. “Go thou to Rome,” Shelley urges, to see the “slope of green access / Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead / A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread” (433, 439-41)—that is, to the Protestant Cemetery, where not only Keats, but also Shelley’s son William (and ultimately Shelley himself) were buried. Other notable Romantics there include Keats’s friend Joseph Severn, and Shelley and Byron’s friend Edward Trelawny. Keats’s grave famously features only the inscription “Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water.” The map of the cemetery is available here.
Florence
Florence is known for its unparalleled art galleries, which were celebrated even in the time of the Romantics. Indeed, Byron’s letters attest to how little the collections have changed in two centuries:
“At Florence I remained but a day, having a hurry for Rome, to which I am thus far advanced. However, I went to the two galleries, from which one returns drunk with beauty. The Venus [dei Medici] is more for admiration than love; but there are sculpture and painting, which for the first time at all gave me an idea of what people mean by their cant, and what Mr. Braham calls “entusimusy” [enthusiasm] about those two most artificial of the arts. What struck me most were, the mistress of Raphael, a portrait; the mistress of Titian, a portrait; a Venus of Titian in the Medici gallery—the Venus; Canova’s Venus also in the other gallery: Titian’s mistress is also in the other gallery (that is, in the Pitti Palace gallery); the Parcae of Michael Angelo, a picture; and the Antinous—the Alexander—and one or two not very decent groups in marble; the Genius of Death, a sleeping figure, etc., etc.”
“The Venus” (Byron’s eyebrows clearly raised) likely refers to the celebrated and controversial “Venus of Urbino,” which is still displayed in the Uffizi Gallery. The other portrait of “Titian’s mistress,” which the poet saw in the Pitti Palace (the former residence of the Medici family), has a particularly interesting history. Usually titled “La Bella,” this painting of an unknown woman (probably the same model used for the “Venus of Urbino”) was taken to France in 1800 during Napoleon’s conquest of Florence. (Napoleon briefly occupied the Pitti Palace itself, and his opulent bathrooms, which are still accessible to visitors, would likely have provided Byron with considerable entertainment). The painting was returned to Florence fifteen years later—only two years before the poet visited the Pitti Palace in 1817. When I visited the gallery in 2011, “La Bella” had just undergone an in-depth restoration, the details of which were explained in an extensive exhibit.
Today, the Pitti Palace also features Lorenzo Bartolini’s bust of Byron, for which the poet posed some years after his sitting with Thorvaldsen:
Bartolini's bust of Byron
Bartolini’s bust of Byron

Byron’s mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, offers an amusing account of the sculptor’s encounter with the poet:
“Bartolini, the sculptor, wrote to Lord Byron to ask permission to come to Pisa and carve a bust of him. Lord Byron liked very much to be surrounded by portraits of his friends and those whom he loved—but he was loath to pose himself. When he did , it was always to please friends. Thorwaldsen had sculptured his head and shoulders for Hobhouse, but Lord Byron did not even have a plaster cast. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, ‘getting painted’ […] But to pose for a bust in marble struck him as vanity and pretentiousness, as wanting to obtrude oneself on posterity rather than leaving a private memento. […] When pressed, he replied that he would sit, provided it was not for himself, and that Bartolini would commit himself to doing a bust of Countess Guiccioli at the same time.
When [Bartolini] set eyes on Lord Byron, he announced that he could never do justice to such an original, since Lord Byron’s handsome appearance and his expression seemed to him to exceed the power of art. He was quite right […] His beauty was wellnigh superhuman in its manifestation, and Bartolini was far from being the man to overcome the difficulty.
Lord Byron himself […] was unfavorably impressed; and when the marble was destined for Murray, he wrote to him: ‘The bust does not turn out a good one, though it may be like for aught I know, as it exactly resembles a superannuated Jesuit.’ Then again: ‘I assure you Bartolini’s is dreadful.’ He also added that if it were like him, he could not be long for this world, for the bust made him look seventy.”
I leave Bartolini’s likeness to your judgment, though the partner bust of the Countess Guiccioli (normally held at the Istituzione Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna) strikes me as being quite serene and beautiful. And a reading of Browning’s “The Statue and the Bust” would not be amiss when visiting the Pitti Palace.
Bartolini's bust of Teresa Guiccioli
Bartolini’s bust of Teresa Guiccioli

Next, though not the grandest cathedral in Florence, the Basilica di Santa Croce is a fascinating historical site, and it too gets the Childe Harold treatment:
In Santa Croce’s holy precincts lie
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though there were nothing save the past, and this,
The particle of those sublimities
Which have relaps’d to chaos:—here repose
Angelo’s, Alfieri’s bones, and his,
The starry Galileo, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli’s earth, return’d to whence it rose.
These are four minds, which, like the elements,
Might furnish forth creation: —Italy! (IV. 54-55)
Santa Croce
Santa Croce

Though Harold was rhapsodically transported by the four great monuments within Santa Croce, Byron himself was less impressed: “The church of ‘Santa Croce’ contains much illustrious nothing. The tombs of Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, Galileo Galilei, and Alfieri, make it the Westminster Abbey of Italy. I did not admire any of these tombs—beyond their contents. That of Alfieri is heavy, and all of them seem to me overloaded. What is necessary but a bust and a name? and perhaps a date?” But in spite of Byron’s derision, Donatello’s frescoes are worth seeing, and more recent additions include a statue by Henry Moore and a monument to Florence Nightingale on the cathedral grounds.

Moving forward through the nineteenth century, a literary tour of Florence would be incomplete without a visit to Casa Guidi, where the Brownings lived from 1847 to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861. Casa Guidi is located on the piano nobile (second floor) at Piazza San Felice 8. Now owned by Eton College, the home has been restored as a museum. Look out for the Brownings’ personal collection of flea-market-acquired Renaissance art.

And, in true Browning spirit, when you visit one of Florence’s many street markets, bring along your copy of the Old Yellow Book, which Robert Browning bought at a Florentine market in 1860. The poet ultimately used the book’s voluminous correspondence about a 1698 murder case to develop his best-selling poem, The Ring and the Book.
La Spezia and the Bay of the Poets
A lovely day-trip from Florence will take you to the province of La Spezia in Liguria, located next to the Tuscan border. The area is most famous for the Cinque Terre, a collection of five tiny coastal villages now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which are linked by a train and hiking trails. The stretch between La Spezia proper and Lerici, one of the many small towns in the area, has been renamed the Golfo dei Poeti (the Bay of the Poets) after the Shelleys and Byron, who lived in the area. The Shelleys’ home on the beach of San Terenzo, Casa Magni, now renamed the Villa Shelley, is accessible by coastal road. The villa is actually available for private rental, though the damage deposit alone might prove too much for a graduate student’s stipend… There is also a monument to Shelley in nearby Viareggio, where Shelley was cremated.

The Byron Grotto is just behind this promontory
The Byron Grotto is just behind this promontory

Portovenere, another UNESCO-protected village on the Ligurian coast, pays considerable homage to Byron. Most important is the Byron Grotto, which commemorates the “Immortal Poet, who as a Daring Swimmer Defied the Waters of the Sea” by swimming from Portovenere to the Shelleys’ home at Lerici.
Byron Grotto in Portovenere
Byron Grotto in Portovenere

The grotto isn’t a particularly appealing swimming-hole, as it’s filled with sharp rocks (perhaps of interest to Romantic geologists!), but there is a staircase that will take you near the water’s edge. Local shops and pizzerias are also named in memory of Byron. And be sure to sample some of the locally made pesto (the town holds a Feast of the Basil every year).
Venice
To set the tone for your final stop, begin by reading Byron’s letters and journals from 1817-1818. A sample: “I am just come out from an hour’s swim in the Adriatic; and I write to you with a black-eyed Venetian girl before me, reading Boccaccio…” Poetically, his first attempt at ottava rima, Beppo, is absolutely required reading for a Venetian stay.
There are a few key literary stops. First is the Palazzo Mocenigo, which Byron rented from the Mocenigo family in 1818. The palace has been turned into a museum of textiles, and much of the décor on the piano nobile dates back to the eighteenth century.  The palazzo’s library holds extensive collections of early editions, including literary works by Byron and the Gambas (Teresa Guiccioli’s family of origin).
The view from the Palazzo Mocenigo in San Stae. The building on the right is the Palazzo
The view from the Palazzo Mocenigo in San Stae. The building on the right is the Palazzo

But be warned: there are several Mocenigo palaces in Venice. This museum is in the San Stae district. When I visited in 2011, museum staff told me that Byron lived on the piano nobile of that building; unfortunately, subsequent searches suggest that the poet lived in another Mocenigo palace in the San Marco district, which I can confirm is closed to the public. But you can see the San Marco Mocenigo palace from a #1 vaporetto ride on the Grand Canal, and admire the balcony from which Margarita Cogni took her impassioned dive during a domestic squabble with the poet.
More rewarding for the poetically-inclined is the Brownings’ palazzo, Ca’Rezzonico, which is located on the Grand Canal and has its own water-taxi stop. Bought by Pen Browning, the poets’ son, and his heiress wife, this was Robert Browning’s last residence. Like the Palazzo Mocenigo, Ca’Rezzonico has also been converted into a museum dedicated to eighteenth-century Venice. It boasts a recreated apothecary’s shop on one of the upper floors, and a traditional enclosed gondola, “Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe” (Beppo ll. 150-51), in the main entrance. (And, as Shelley’s heroic couplets in “Julian and Maddalo” make clear, “gondola” really did rhyme with “way” in the nineteenth century). Browning’s rooms are on the ground floor; when I visited, they were closed for repairs. The museum café is lovely, though, and you can sit on the terrace overlooking the canal.
Located in the city centre, St Mark’s Square, is the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), the historical residence of the democratically-elected rulers of Venice, and its annexed prison. Notably for Romanticists, the Doge’s Palace features the so-called Bridge of Sighs, a name fancifully coined by Byron to commemorate the sighs of the prisoners as they caught a final glimpse of the lagoon before being taken to their cells. As usual, Childe Harold says it best:
I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand;
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times, when many a subject land
Look’d to the wingèd Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles! (IV.1)
The prisoners' last view from the Bridge of Sighs
The prisoners’ last view from the Bridge of Sighs

And, for eighteenth-century aficionados, the Doge’s Palace offers a splendid tour focused on Casanova’s imprisonment and dramatic flight from the allegedly “unescapable” prison.
My final suggestion, for those looking to emulate Casanova’s escape from Venice’s main tourist hub, is a short boat-journey to the Lido, the final stop on the #1 vaporetto line. Here, you can revisit the initial setting of Shelley’s conversation poem “Julian and Maddalo,” which was based on a series of philosophical debates he had with Byron in Venice in 1818. The “bank of land which breaks the flow / Of Adria towards Venice” was a favourite riding-place for the poets: “This ride was my delight.—I love all waste / And solitary places” (ll. 2, 14-15). And, looking West from the Lido at sundown, you can try to find the Maniac’s dwelling:
A building on an island; such a one
As age to age might add, for uses vile,
A windowless, deformed and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung… (99-103)
One final word of caution: take care not to travel to the Lido in a “heavy squall,” lest you, like Byron, return to an unexpected dressing-down: “Ah! Dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to the Lido?”
Happy travels—and may you, like the poets, be creatively inspired by Italy—the “Mother of Arts, once our guardian, and still our guide” (Childe Harold IV. 47).
(All photos belong to Arden Hegele)