Technology Makes It Simple
I think this post dovetails quite nicely off the previous one and its discussion of the Digital Humanities. We are all pursuing graduate study during a time of great transition and change. Technological advances have allowed scholars to broaden their scope. The term “distant reading” is gaining more and more traction as databases and new research tools allow us to map continuity and change more precisely over greater periods of time.
One of the opportunities that technology facilitates, however, has received slightly less attention: collaboration. I am currently working on a collaborative article with colleague of mine and thought it may be useful to share my experience with the NASSR community.
Last week I spent a considerable amount of time editing a draft version of the article. We have been having Google Docs parties on a regular basis for several weeks now. We are able to see the changes each of us makes as well as have a quick little chat alongside the document in a handy dandy side bar. As a bit of a technological dunce, this all amazes me.
In the past, scholars in the humanities have collaborated in order to examine longer periods of time. This is indeed true for myself. My colleague specializes in the long eighteenth – century and I am, of course, a card – carrying Romanticist. We have both made use of the databases and research tools available to us. Therefore, technology has broadened both of our individual scopes and in turn lead to a project that is very ambitious.
Spend Time With Someone Who Thinks Differently Than You
Over the course of my career, I have been accused of burrowing into texts; I love me some close – reading. Naturally, beginning to think of ways of entering scholarly discourse and writing a dissertation that A) is relevant B) engages numerous texts required some significant adjustments. I am still learning the best ways to combine my intense interest in individual texts with larger trends / questions / queries.
My esteemed colleague, coincidentally, thinks in broad and ambitious ways. He asks questions not in terms of texts or authors but tropes / genres / representation. Having regular conversations with such a thinker and being asked to use specific texts in order to talk about these larger categories has been immensely productive for me. Likewise, engaging with a fiercely intense close – reader has made my colleague more aware of certain nuances in literary works. Also, I am pleased to say, my dissertation has benefited greatly from my collaborative endeavors.
Collaboration Saves Time
With the demands that coursework, dissertation writing / research, teaching, reading groups, outside jobs, and crime – fighting make on our time, we Romanticists are left with little to spare. Oftentimes we turn to coursework essays or our dissertations for potential publications. This only makes sense: those documents say much about our interests and methodology. However, writing an article with someone else broadens those interests while also requiring a reasonable amount of time. Writing an article on the side may seem impossible to an individual. Writing an article with a colleague allows you to divide and conquer. Whether you find, like me, that those pesky and often contested period boundaries provide a convenient way to find a partner in arms or you grab someone inside your period with a different set of interests, collaboration allows you to enter the scholarly fray for half the anxiety.
Good For The Old C V
How many times have you claimed that you enjoy working with others? If you are like me, the answer is 27. A collaborative piece of writing allows potential employers to see that you not only like working with others, you actually have! What we do is by nature incredibly isolating. The group of authors we have chosen to focus on make that isolation seem oh so sexy and cool. However, Wordsworth and Coleridge worked together, Shelley “dosed” Byron with some Wordsworth, Blake “spoke to” Milton, and even Keats had Joseph Severn. I am just saying, that without collaboration, Wordsworth would not be able to put Lyrical Ballads on his poetic C V.
Digital Humanities Summer Institute: Nerds Welcome!
Full disclosure: I am a Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) convert, and I want to share the good news. I’ve recently returned from my second year attending DHSI at the University of Victoria, and I have only great things to say.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has called DHSI a “Summer Camp for Digital Humanists,” and my own experiences verify this description. DHSI is five days of glorious nerdy exploration and collaboration, and I thought it might be worthwhile to introduce the DHSI to those unfamiliar with it.
What is it?
Unlike a traditional conference, DHSI does not offer panels of 20-minute papers.
Instead, it is what its name implies—a digital training institute.
DHSI offers a wide range of courses from basic introductions to text encoding and digitization to advanced programming and mobile application design. (For a list of the courses that happened this year, click here.) Each day, participants attend roughly five hours of class. Beyond the individual courses, DHSI provides numerous opportunities to see work-in-progress presentations, attend breakout skills training sessions and discussions, and hear plenary talks. This year, it was possible to attend events from 8AM to 6PM—not to mention post-conference frivolity at one of the bars near the University. In short, DHSI is intense, invigorating, and exhausting.
Even though the programs at DHSI have been growing at an impressive rate—this year seventeen different courses were offered and more than 400 people attended—it still manages to maintain a collaborative and surprisingly intimate atmosphere. The hierarchies that are sometimes present at other conferences are entirely absent at DHSI. The Institute prides itself on an friendly “opt-in” policy. You are encouraged to invite yourself along to other people’s dinner plans and discussion groups. It’s a great opportunity to meet both Romanticists and people from other fields.
Funding
According to the DHSI Director Ray Siemens’s closing remarks, the course offerings for next year’s DHSI will be released shortly. The dates are already set: June 10-14, 2013. As you begin to look ahead to planning the coming year’s conference and research schedule (and funding options for both), it may be worth putting DHSI in your calendar. There are many scholarships available for DHSI. For those working in the nineteenth-century, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) offers tuition scholarships. The Institute itself also offers tuition scholarships (early registration is key for these). The Association for Computers and the Humanities also offers travel bursaries to ACH members. More information will be available on the DHSI website soon. Moreover, because DHSI offers training that is not easily available elsewhere, it may be possible to get funding from your own institution.
I already have DHSI marked on my calendar for next year, and I hope to see many more Romanticists there.
On Being Yourself in Another Language
The first day of language class our instructor asked us to say, in German, one positive and one negative thing about ourselves. There were about ten people in the class, and we went around in a circle answering the question. I was nervous. When it got to be my turn, I said, as a positive thing, that I am “kreativ” (which is basically English, let’s be honest) and, because the only negative adjective in German that I could think of in that moment was “faul,” which means lazy, I said that.
At that point onward, I felt my classmates had misconstrued some basic part of myself. From the three beautiful Swedes in the corner to our teacher, the ex-feminist ex-hippy from Berlin, they all looked at me like I was suddenly an artistic layabout: as anti-German as one could get, given the state of the EU’s economy at the moment.
So let’s be clear: I am not lazy. I am so far from being lazy, that I de-skin tomatoes before making pasta sauce. That I whip whipped-cream by hand. So not lazy, in fact, that I have been known to bicycle to Switzerland to buy cheese. But there it was. Faced with a dearth of vocabulary for the first time in my life, I’d created this negative space, which I felt destined to inhabit for the rest of the language class.
I’ve since worked it out. Now I have a much larger German vocabulary to draw upon and, more importantly, now I am much calmer in German-speaking scenarios. This means the words come to mind without the heart-pounding effort I experienced in that first classroom. I can try and think around the problem of self-expression and find a way to say what I mean, even if it sounds awkward and more complex than it needs to be. It’s a struggle and also kind of freeing. Ich traue mich zu probieren. (I dare myself to try). The result of this kind of work is that I am beginning to know just how hard it is and must be, really, to get at the heart of something in translation.
For one chapter of my dissertation, I am reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s poems and fragments; I think Hölderlin’s complicated, brittle elegies are fascinating. At the University of Konstanz, where I am currently on exchange, I have been meeting about every second Monday morning with Ulrich Gaier, Professor Emeritus and President of the Hölderlin Society.
Here is a synopsis of our relationship: I send him my ideas (which are largely based on translations and heavily influenced by English-language scholarship which may or may not also be in translation) and then we talk about the extent to which my resulting conclusions are mediated by the word choices of translators, are misconstrued derivations of certain words that I take to mean one thing but that, in German, have totally different connotations, or are unmoored from Hölderlin’s poetic tempo because I’ve missed the implied caesura between accented syllables in the German original (that was yesterday).
Professor Gaier’s immense generosity and insight are unmatched. I am so thankful that he is willing to spend time with me thinking about these issues; his big-heartedness has made this time in Germany so valuable and generative. And incredibly, I have found that from this discourse about what is lost in translation there has arisen one the most incredible things: an experience of being more completely myself. When you are truly out of your element, the impulse to take risks is not undermined by expectations of what you “should” be doing. The question you want to ask is the question you do ask, silly or no. Being yourself in another language: ich traue mich zu probieren.
Graduate Study: Abroad and at Home
Many of the top graduate programs in British Romanticism can be found in the United States. Some might find this strange: that, for many of us, our academic interests, geographically-speaking, lie so far from where we live, work, and study. Why, if we’re so invested in learning about the culture of another country, regardless of how far in the past it is, do we not all flock to the UK to study our Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats? The easy answer is that we don’t have to, especially as more and more unpublished and out-of-print manuscripts find their way to online archives and databases. At the same time, for some scholars, a British education can provide benefits that studying at an American university cannot and vice versa. In this post, I will discuss some of the basic differences between the university systems in these two countries for prospective graduate students who may be considering options beyond their own country.
Drawing on my own experiences studying at the Masters level in both the US and the UK, my observations are, of course, limited to what I know of Lehigh University and the University of Stirling. There will be many exceptions to the systems in which I have participated, just as there are many variations on English or Literature degrees within the same country. I know the structure of education in Cambridge and Oxford are fairly different from other universities, still deeply embedded in historical tradition. However, these two universities aside, there are a few basic aspects that seem to consistently differentiate the British from the American experience of graduate (or postgraduate) education.
The US:
Though structures vary, PhD candidates typically take at least two or three semesters of coursework before taking the comprehensive exams, which cover two or three fields of specific study and include both written and oral components. These fields consist of areas in which the student wishes to write but also to teach. During this time, most American universities also require students to fulfill a language requirement in one or two languages in addition to English. Some programs also require a portfolio of writing before the exam process. After taking exams, the student develops a dissertation proposal, after which the student is classified as ABD (all but dissertation) and spends the rest of his or her time completing that dissertation. This typically lasts 2-4 years, bringing the total time spent at the PhD level to 4-6 years (in addition to the one or two years for the Masters degree). Give or take, anyway. Students generally support themselves by teaching one or two composition or literature classes per semester, usually at the introductory level.
The UK:
For the most part, postgraduate study in British universities is condensed in terms of time-commitment, placing more emphasis on writing and professional development than coursework and teaching. The Masters degree typically takes one full year: two semesters of coursework, and a Masters thesis (called the dissertation), which is produced by the end of the following summer. The PhD candidate, or research postgrad, then jumps right into thinking about a dissertation, and part of the application for admission includes a detailed dissertation (or thesis) proposal. The nice part of this, of course, is that there is no language requirement and no comprehensive exams (well, “nice”, depending on how you look at it), though there are similar hurtles throughout the writing process. The program, then, encourages independent study right from day one. The first semester is spent mostly reading and revising ideas formulated in the proposal, and, at the end of the second semester, the student undertakes a transfer interview, during which he or she presents a piece of written work, including where that piece fits into the larger project, and an extensive literature review (similar in some ways to the comps reading list, from what I understand) that shows where the project will fit into the much larger field. After the transfer interview, the student typically spends an additional two-three years completing the thesis in order to present it to the examiners. Students support themselves with some teaching, though these opportunities seem to be somewhat limited, depending on the university.
Obviously, there are very strong pros and cons to both of these systems. In
a practical sense, the British experience is much shorter and gets you out into the job market much quicker than the grueling American 7 years. At the same time, however, the practical thorn in all our sides, money, is much easier to come by in American universities, where undergraduates pay exorbitant tuition fees. In British universities, fees are reversed: undergraduates pay comparatively low fees, while postgraduate students pay tuition fees that are still relatively low for British and EU students, though funding opportunities seem less readily available. While full-tuition scholarships are not uncommon, extra stipends are much rarer. For American students (non-EU), British tuition rates line up more closely to American rates and can be a challenge to cover without the safety net of teaching assistantships and university fellowships. This having been said, both countries have their strengths and weaknesses in particular fields, making the extra time or extra money spent in grad school worth considering.
Especially if you’re working in British literature, there can be obvious benefits to studying in the UK for archival and travel purposes: the ease of public transportation makes it easy to take a day trip to the Edinburgh Writer’s Museum, the Charles Dickens House, or the home of the Bronte sisters. For many of us, studying abroad as undergraduates has allowed us access to some of these places, but I think there is a lot to be said for importance of work environment. Who wouldn’t find writing a dissertation chapter about Northanger Abbey in a coffee shop in Bath a much more enjoyable experience, after all?
Personally, when I was deciding whether or not to return to the United States after completing an MLitt (Master of Letters) at a Scottish university, money ended up being the deciding factor, despite the fact that the UK is years ahead of the US in terms of Gothic Studies. Another consideration I had was a (perhaps masochistic) appreciation for the comprehensive exam process and the expertise it would help me achieve for teaching. For scholars who plan to specialize more in research than teaching, however, the exams may not hold as much value, and sometimes it can be worth taking out loans if you think you can cover them later. It completely depends on the student and the student’s ultimate career goals.
If you’re currently looking into Masters and Doctoral programs, my advice is, don’t limit yourself to your own country! What works best for you may be found across the pond.
Helpful links:
http://www.prospects.ac.uk/postgraduate_study_1.htm
http://www.internationalstaff.ac.uk/education_in_the_uk.php
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/postgraduates
Editing Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth's Decision to Remove "The Convict"
Only one poem from the original 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads does not appear in the two volume 1800 edition: Wordsworth’s “The Convict.” The specific political goals of the poem do indeed make it difficult to situate among the other works in the collection (with the exception of Coleridge’s “The Dungeon”). For most critics, “The Convict” is out of keeping with the rest of the poems in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. When scholars such as Celeste Langan and Quentin Bailey do engage the poem, they usually do so under the larger category of vagrants or vagrancy. In other words, the convict, like Martha Ray of “The Thorn,” the mad mother, and the idiot boy, is one of the marginal figures that Wordsworth’s poetry pulls to forefront. Yet the convict receives his title not from a loquacious speaker or a gossipy group of townspeople but from a formal political institution. Furthermore, while crime, even violent crime, is implied in several poems in Lyrical Ballads, in “The Convict” clear action is taken. For example, while the speaker of “The Thorn” claims that “some had sworn an oath that she [Martha Ray] / Should be to public justice brought,” no punishment ever occurs (323-3). “The Convict,” in contrast, depends upon the presence of “public justice” for its very title.
Yet, for all of its differences, I want to suggest that the “The Convict” does share one crucial feature with the other poems in Lyrical Ballads: the centrality of the speaker. By examining the physical and imaginative movement of Wordsworth’s sympathetic speaker, I will show how “The Convict,” to a certain extent, “fits” with the larger project of the collection. When we turn to the poem, we see encounter the speaker standing on a mountain slope in the “glory of evening” (1). Reluctantly, he leaves his idyllic surroundings to visit the convict within the “thick ribbed walls” and “the glimmering gate” of his prison (9,11). As Kenneth Johnston notes, the poem “turns very abruptly from its opening scene of natural beauty to a highly articulated scene of human suffering” (419). The subject of the poem, an individual convicted of committing a crime, has already faced public judgment. There is also, as Quentin Bailey and others have noted, no suggestion that the convict is innocent. As judgment has been made and the guilty convict imprisoned, the public’s engagement with him, it would seem, is at a close.
In the fictional scenes of “The Convict,” Wordsworth’s speaker is able not only to represent the convict’s sad state but also use his “fancy” to see what lies in the man’s heart. Gazing at the convict as he sits staring dejectedly at his fetters, the speaker claims “’Tis sorrow enough on that visage to gaze, / That body dismiss’d from his care; / Yet my fancy has pierced to his heart, and pourtrays / More terrible images there” (17-20). Although the mere sight of the convict’s “visage” is “sorrow enough,” the speaker is able to push further, to offer more insight. Through his “fancy,” Wordsworth’s speaker can look not only on the convict’s “matted head,” neglected body, and the crippling effects imprisonment has on his body, but also gaze into the convict’s “heart” and find “the more terrible images there.” It is telling that rather than revealing details of the convict’s crime, these “terrible images” show the degree to which the convict “wishes the past to undo” (22). According to the speaker, the convict’s “crime, through the pains that o’erwhelm him, descried, / Still blackens and grows on his view” (23-4). The speaker suggests that it is remorse for his crime that “blackens” the convict’s appearance. Such insight, or perhaps more accurately, imaginative speculation, is possible in the fictional scenes of Wordsworth’s poem.
According to the speaker, the monarch has the potential to alleviate the convict’s sufferings. He imagines how different the convict’s situation might be if the king were standing in his place: “When from the dark synod, or blood-reeking field, / To his chamber the monarch is led, / All soothers of sense their soft virtue shall yield, / And quietness pillow his head” (25-8). Like his own movement from the mountain slope to the prison, the speaker imagines the king leaving a dark church or a bloody battlefield to come to the convict’s chamber. The speaker locates the monarch in three value-laden spaces: the church, the battlefield, and the prison are all places in which the public is constituted and acts (thinking here of Locke, Kames’s “publick” from Historical Law-Tracts, and Bentham). In others words, Wordsworth’s speaker refers to places that became metonymic for the common interest, places where the public is constituted. The monarch entering the convict’s cell is endowed with the necessary agency to assist him.
At the close of the poem, the speaker rewrites this earlier episode by imagining what he would do if he commanded the power of the monarch. The convict, so weighed down by his condition, lets out a tear which the speaker proceeds to read: “The motion unsettles a tear; / The silence of sorrow it seems to supply, / And asks me why I am here” (42-4). In the speech act that follows, the speaker offers his answer:
“Poor victim! no idle intruder has stood
With o’erweening complacence our state to compare,
But one, whose first wish is the wish to be good,
Is come as a brother thy sorrows to share.
“At thy name though compassion her nature resign,
Though in virtue’s proud mouth thy report be a stain,
My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine,
Would plant thee where yet thou might’st blossom again.” (45-52)
In these lines, the speaker identifies himself as a special type of observer. Unlike the “idle
intruder” who visit the convict’s cell to compare his state to that of the imprisoned criminal, Wordsworth’s speaker expresses a desire “to share” the convict’s “sorrows.” As Bailey points out, the speaker distinguishes himself from more sentimental visitors and the moralizing of writers like Robert Southey because in late eighteenth century Britain “visits to a prison could too easily be assimilated by the literature of sentimentality and suffering” (7). “The Convict,” then, strives to avoid falling into these generic pitfalls and puts forward a suggestion for penal reform. It is also important to note that in the closing stanza, the speaker states that the personified abstractions of “compassion” and “virtue” have named and judged the convict. The phrase “thy name” could refer to the title of the poem itself. The title of “convict” is a name that has been assigned to this man by “public justice,” which in turn has led to him being abandoned and condemned by “quietness,” “compassion,” and “virtue.”
Many critics have recognized the influence of Godwin in the poem’s crucial
final two lines and their call for reform. Emile Legouis points out that, like Godwin’s Political Justice, Wordsworth’s poem calls for “transportation as a substitute for capital punishment” and “kindness and compassion” for the convicted (309). The speaker’s desire to relocate the convict is indeed clear, but many critical studies do not consider the manner in which the speaker expresses this desire. The final eight lines of the poem can be read as the speaker’s attempt at a performative speech act. If “the arm of the mighty” were the speaker’s to command, his words would perform an action: they would transport the convict, “plant” him somewhere where he “might’st blossom again.” Such a closing further connects Wordsworth to Godwin. As Angela Esterhammer points out, Jeremy Bentham “interpreted laws as verbal utterances exchanged between sovereigns and subjects” (554). While Bentham describes laws as speech acts, Godwin believes, as is clear in Political Justice, that language’s “only legitimate purpose is the communication of truth” and that words should never do anything (Esterhammer 555). According to Esterhammer, for Godwin, “all speech acts that attempt to exert control over future behavior ultimately work against the improvement of society because they institutionalize error, protect existing abuses, and prevent reform” (557). In other words, temporality troubles
contracts, oaths, pledges, promises, and all other performative speech acts.
Bentham’s classification of laws and Godwin’s, to borrow the title of Esterhammer’s
essay, “suspicion of speech acts” provide an useful context for examining the close of “The
Convict.” The speaker imagines himself in a position to make a verbal utterance that would carry with it the weight of the law. “If” he commanded the power of the monarch, the speaker’s words would enact the very political reform that critics have identified in Godwin and Wordsworth.
While Godwin’s main anxiety about performative speech acts centers around time, the anxiety of Wordsworth’s speaker appears to have more to do with who has the capacity to make a performative utterance. “The Convict,” then, documents two types of representative failure. First, the “fancy” of the speaker shows the reader what lies in the convict’s heart after his judgment and imprisonment. Secondly, as is evident throughout the poem and forcefully so at its close, the monarch and “public justice” do not represent the will of the sympathetic speaker.
Perhaps the poem’s attempt to represent more “accurately” a marginalized figure and its meditation on the failure of political representation more generally connects it to the larger democratic purpose of Lyrical Ballads that will be announced in 1800.
Dialectical Effusions, or Why I love the Romantics – Part II
So, without further adieu, I will discuss the two working axioms and further elaborate on my reasons for loving the Romantics.
1. They were audacious and/or eccentric (perhaps I should just say “outrageous.”)
Some representative statements and exploits should suffice.
- Coleridge and Southey‘s desire to establish a pantisocracy in America. Who does this? But how noble and grand that before Marx, some people did (or proposed doing it): an egalitarian commune. Wow. And these people are those we now call the Romantics.
- Coleridge on Hume (after the young Hazlitt asks for his take): “‘Hume? He stole his essay on miracles from South’s sermon!’ replied Coleridge. ‘He can’t even write. He’s unreadable’” (Wu 6). Yes, one of the 18th century’s greatest philosopher is summarily dismissed by the young Coleridge. Only someone with immense belief in their own talent would say such a thing and at the end of the 18th century when Hume’s status as a world-class philosopher was by then established.
- The actress and writer Mary Robinson’s outrageous dalliance with the teenaged prince regent. Playing the role that made her famous, Perdita, in an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale, she speaks the following lines at a royal command performance: “… how to put on/This novel garment of gentility…/ …I shall learn/ I trust I shall with meekness, and an heart/Unalter’d to my Prince, my Florizel.” (Byrne 99). Her performance draws tears from the prince, as well as several bows–and his heart. After suffering bad press (though her ability to manipulate it was uncanny) due to her romantic attachments to the prince and to other powerful men (whom, it does not appear, the press smeared for their indiscretions though certainly for their politics), she is audacious enough to re-invent herself as a master poet and novelist. Of her, Coleridge said, “She is a woman of undoubted Genius…I never knew a human Being with so full a mind” (Byrne Epigraphs). From one genius provocateur to another.
- Lady Caroline Lamb, the ultimate femme fatale. She is known for writing the famous lines that have immortalized Byron: “[He was] mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (Hay 13). After their romance comes to an end (for Byron, that is) the aristocratic Caroline will not be ignored *cue Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction*. She forcefully makes herself known by breaking in to Byron’s residence and inscribing the following words in his copy of Vathek (an action filled with significance given Byron’s championing and practice of Greek Love and Beckford and his novel’s notoriety): “Remember me! Remember me!” Oh, and she also writes the novel Glenarvon–the titular character is a Byronic hero who is actually based on Byron…(wait, how does that work?)–quite possibly the first tell-all book written in the Gothic mode. Byron claimed that, upon her betrayal of him, he would pursue Caroline like Falkland had pursued Caleb. It appears that Lady Lamb turned the tables on this scenario.
- Claire Clairmont, the not-so-famous family member (but look at the competition, though). I had always assumed she had been introduced to Byron by Mary and Percy in Switzerland but no: she wrote him before the famous trip. In an intrepid fan letter to Byron, the eighteen year old Claire commits the following lines to paper: “If a woman, whose reputation has yet remained unstained…if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years…if she should return your kindness with fond affection and unbounded devotion could you betray her, or would you be as silent as the grave?” (Hay 78). He takes her up on her offer, though I’m not sure he didn’t betray her. But still, her letter and its fine sentence constructions render her boldly interesting.
2. They were pretty good writers too.
Whatever the criteria used to establish literary merit, their writing can be sharply ironic, lyrical, polemical, rhetorically persuasive, and often multi-generic. I’m not saying that each Romantic writer totally evinces these qualities (though I think some do) but, certainly, each exhibits mastery of at least one genre, if not two (or more). And even those that are associated with one genre, such as Wordsworth (though the 1802 Preface is pretty masterly as an essay if you ask me), are top-notch in that genre. As such, on any given day, I read the Romantics purely for their aesthetics or politics, though when writing papers, for both. But the point is that their writing is always engaging, wholly absorbing, whatever its genre, content, and politics.
(Is there an un-interesting Romantic writer? I’ve yet to find her or him. Let me know, though I suspect whoever this enigmatic figure is, something of major interest will be found in terms of their biography, writing, or political affiliations, watch.)
Politics: Conservative or liberal, Tory or Whig, the manifest political tendencies in the writing of several authors show Romantic writing to be irrevocably enmeshed with the political concerns of its day. Whether we are discussing Burke’s defense of the French monarchy (all monarchy, really) or Wollstonecraft’s Reflections on the Revolution in France or Byron’s impassioned poetic defense in “Song of the Luddites,” the intersection between history, polemical writing, and aesthetics is tightly welded together: one cannot have one without the others.
Lyricism: I was struck by Wordsworth’s lyricism. Now, I know about the sort of anti-Wordsworthian turn in Romantic studies (or so it seems to me). Or, I think scholars are perhaps reacting to the once powerful, institutionally-sanctioned equivalence between Romanticism and Wordsworth (or any of the Big Six at different times). I get it. But still. Never mind his so-called “conservative turn”: his poetry is so lyrical. The first lines of the Intimations Ode are etched in my memory: “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream…did seem/apparell’d in celestial light….” And it gets better: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Wow. This longing for the luminosity of the past. Beautiful. (And I’m aware of the French Revolutionary undertone but, nevertheless, I still sometimes just want to read it for its cadence and beauty, its power to stir something melancholy and ineffable in me…) And I am one to be seduced by style, easily, as my obsession with Ayn Rand in my early twenties proves. She, by the way, wrote a book titled The Romantic Manifesto…talk about misreading (though Rand and my eventual turning from her writings and teachings are subjects for another day. Suffice to say that I do not consider her a Romantic nor do I now consider myself a Randian.)
Anyway, to conclude I’ll say that as with all obsessions, scholarly and otherwise, I believe they originate in some primal scene, in a trauma experienced during one’s formative years. Discussing what such primal scenes might be in my life are beyond the scope of this blog, though I have no aversion to discussing them—ask me at a conference sometime. I will say, however, that I am continually propelled and assailed by contradictions, that is, I am almost always besieged by contradictory impulses. For instance, some days, I want to live in a world where transcendence is possible. On such days, I happen to believe in extraterrestrials and want to experience what some UFO specialists designate as Theophony (a connection with all and with God) which occurs in one of the stages following an alien abduction. I’ve even thought about camping out and keeping a night’s watch for sight of aliens. I sometimes converse with my ancestral deity, Ometeotl Moyocoyani (“He who invents or gives existence to himself”), as if I were chatting with my neighbor about the weather. And I’ve also thought about reading Hermetic scrolls in order to discover the ritual, symbolic steps I need to take in order to lose consciousness of myself while entering into communion with the plenitude of the Universe. Transcendental knowledge. Yes, I seriously have thoughts about this. And, so, there are the Romantics whose lyricism and content provide somewhat of transcendental moments.
On other days, the political unconscious aggressively asserts itself: not only Romantic texts but also newspaper headlines, advertisements, the idea of transcendence, and the unjust social order all scream out their ideological construction. It is with Jacobinical fervor that I begin to re-focus on political and economic crises and on the privations suffered by various underclasses. When I do, my pursuit of transcendence seems a tad misguided and quietistic. I struggle, always, with my decision to pursue graduate school while several communities I hold close to my heart continue to struggle, while I’m writing seminar papers on Percy’s “Alastor”. But I’m ok with this. Now. And this is because the Romantics are (incredibly!) with me on all these issues, as well. In fact, I audaciously venture to say that the Romantics speak not only to these contradictory impulses but to every desire (earthly or transcendental), impulse (political or artistic), occurrence–momentous or mundane–under the sun.
Folks, I can’t wait to start the English PhD program this fall.
Works Cited
Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson.
New York: Random House, 2004. Print.
Hay, Daisy. Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest
Generation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print.
Wu, Duncan. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008. Print.
Processing the WPRP Exhibit; Or, Making an Argument with Books in Cases
The Women Poets of the Romantic Period (WPRP) exhibit, called “Landmarks,” is just a few weeks away from opening in CU Libraries. The opening is set to coincide with the June 7 start of the 20th-Anniversary British Women Writers Conference, an international professional-level conference that I am co-organizing this year. When we’re done curating the WPRP exhibit, we’ll have an in-house exhibit in 8 enormous cases in the Rare Book Room as well as an online exhibit of around 20 scanned works and extended explanatory captions, photographs, and a video production. I’ve been feeling less like a dissertating PhD student and more like a contestant on Project Runway lately, working with fabric, mylar, props like shells and even a preserved spider, a museum exhibit designer, photographers, a period music consultant, and even videographers. The cast of collaborators is long and brings together librarians; graduate students in English, musicology, and museum studies; undergraduate library assistants; computer scientists and media artists; literary and art historians; and more. And thanks to the extremely friendly and collegial tone set by Debbie Hollis, the head of CU Libraries Archives and Special Collections, we are happy and very busy collaborators.
At this point, the cases are full and designed and objects are most likely in their final places, though I will no doubt futz with them more as we near the exhibit opening. My current task is to compose the script for the photographer/videographer of the exhibit and to serve as the general editor of the large collection of captions that will describe these objects online and in the video. In other words, I’m documenting the argument that I want the objects on display to make. Or rather, as I’ve found, I’m documenting the argument that the objects on display create. (I will publish these on my blog when they are complete and my collaborators are ready to release them.)
When making arguments with objects in cases, the objects, like Keats’ Grecian Urn, are anything but silent. The objects seem to arrange themselves first and the argument reveals itself afterward. This process is more physical and far less of the purely cerebral process that I have grown so used to with writing essays or dissertating. Trying to make the objects’ display conform to the argument I imagined for them did not work for me. After working with them for a year, I’ve been influenced as much by the physical and visual qualities of these books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and letters as I have by their textual content. I have spent far more time working with some of them than with others — for example, I painstakingly transcribed Mary Cockle’s letter and then worked with Susan Guinn-Chipman, another colleague in Special Collections, to piece together the parts that were difficult to read. Due to the time spent handling and reading these artifacts in cradles, in the stacks, on shelves, and on tables in Special Collections, and also the occasions I used them to teach my undergraduate literature classes, I have been influenced by their physical properties and arrangements in space and these traits have influenced my attentions and the argument I feel that the exhibit makes.
My argument for this exhibit, therefore, is based heavily on physical constraints and visual properties of the exhibit as well as my research gathered from reading these literary artifacts and thinking about them in the context of the Romantic literary era. Curating the exhibit was a mixed process of object placement based on:
- the 200+ works in the collection that I read from June 2011 through January 2012 (my reading list was based on numerous factors, including titles and spines that grabbed my attention, ability to find them on the shelves, recommendations from other scholars, personal interests, and more)
- pragmatism (certain objects only fit in certain cases)
- aesthetics (certain objects only show well in certain cases)
- my personal research interests (visual media, travel writing, the picturesque, and the gothic)
- the arc of my desired argument as the path from one case or section to the next
- the arc of the argument that the objects, when placed in the display cases, created and that influenced the argument I set out to make.
- other factors I’m unintentionally leaving out
For example, the argument that I set out to make was focused on the collection as one that lent itself to the study of travel writing in the Romantic era, how print traveled, and what that had to do with women authors and complex relationships between form and gender in print culture. However, when placing objects in the front of the exhibit, in the cases closest to the door, I realized that the exhibit is as much about changing ideas of what constitutes the domestic as it is about that which lies beyond the home. This realization grew out of thinking about the Stainforth’s position in the case next to the literary annual with the beaded cover, and after pulling the Taylors’ Rhymes for the Nursery out of this case to place elsewhere. This led me to rethink the thematic organization of the exhibit. Originally, there were just two categories–natural destinations and social destinations–but these quickly expanded into three to include the domestic as our starting place. Furthermore, between the domestic and natural destinations, I noticed a collection of works, including the Taylors’ numerous works of children’s literature, that engage the Gothic aesthetic and provide a link between home, nature, and social destinations. I settled on four categories and a flow from book objects representing the domestic and home, to the gothic, to nature, and finally to social destinations and social movements. (Of course, many of these books could be placed in multiple categories.)
Perhaps a good question to ask is: where is the argument in this exhibit? Does it emanate from the objects’ placements, the path of the visitor/viewer through the exhibit, or my textual explanations of the relationships between these objects and their home in the greater collection? How does the digital exhibit and collection influence or affect the in-house exhibit, and vice versa? And what about the additional documentary components of video and photography of the exhibit? It’s a lot to curate and even more to interpret. I admit that from where I stand right now, I’m lost in the process and on deadline, to boot.
As we know, readers and interpreters will read and interpret how they will; one cannot force readers’ paths of critical attention any more than I can control which case visitors to this exhibit will want to look at first. The case by the door is the obvious choice, but who knows, a viewer may be drawn to the red cloth in the Gothic case in the back of the room, or the promise of the spider specimen hidden therein. Despite my lack of control, I will offer my exhibit argument as a way to thoughtfully present a microcosm of the magnificent ~500-work WPRP collection. The argument and the path from case to case will, in theory, lead scholars, readers, and visitors into the collection either in the Rare Book Room or online and will draw renewed attention to Romantic-era women poets who are have changed print culture and literary history.
[Author’s note: this post was originally published on my research blog: http://kirstynleuner.wordpress.com.]
Dialectical Effusions, or Why I love the Romantics – Part I
As a recently admitted student to a doctoral program in English, for my first blog I figured I would reflect on why I am pursuing the study of British Romanticism. Be forewarned: some of my reasons are un-academic, wildly emotional even, and in some ways flagrantly partake of the Romantic ideology (See McGann). But I’m ok with this.
I will organize my reasons for my love and pursuit of Romantic studies around two working axioms: 1) “The Romantics were audacious and/or eccentric” and 2) “Their writing is pretty good, too.” I will conclude by reflecting on my (almost) libidinal reasons for my attraction to the Romantics–(you have to read up to the ending, see?)
Before elaborating on each axiom, I will first discuss how I stumbled across the Romantics and then proceeded to fall wildly in love with them and their writing. As a junior Honors English major, I had a day left before deciding on an honors elective seminar. The following course title leaped out at me: “Sex, Drugs, and Rights: Experimentation in the British Romantic Era”–with a course title like that, who wouldn’t be immediately intrigued by the Romantics? I signed up right away. I showed up to class and we began to work our way through the “Rights” portion of the syllabus. We read William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice against the backdrop of the so-called Pamphlet Wars: Burke contra the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft contra Burke, and so on. The idea that the political and the aesthetic and their intersectionality were at this period so urgently and publicly debated grabbed a hold of my imagination.
Moreover, being a double major in Chicana/o Studies, the idea that civil rights and reformist politics were not solely an American 1960s phenomenon, threw off my sense of a progressive sense of history–an aporia: before the 1960s, the British (of all people!), were in the vanguard of reform and demanding civil rights for women, the working class, etc? And as far back as the 1790s? The thought was staggering and led to more questions, one being: what happened to civil rights reform in England and the U.S. in the 1790s—1960s interval? These types of historical questions set the tone for the rest of the semester and have continued to inform my studies of the Romantics and of Civil Rights history & literature, generally. (I recently discovered the concept of “postmodern Jacobinism” in Orrin Wang’s Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory which provided me with the means for theorizing the link between the French Revolutionary 1790s and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.)
We also read De Quincey’s Confessions and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and William Beckford’s Vathek. (Here, I will only discuss De Quincey). Wow. Though De Quincey’s elaborate and operatic drug-induced hallucinations fascinated me to no end, the first half of the book–the “sober” portion–also grabbed my attention. Here was this son of a merchant who though materially impoverished, knew his Greek and Latin (something he reminds his reader of continuously and at one point, I think, claims to know better than an uppity man of the cloth). De Quincey’s self-representations were contradictory but intriguing. On the one hand, he is quick to remind readers of his classical learning; while on the other, even as he strains to define himself against London’s lumpenproletariat, there is a sense of empathy for the disempowered, evidenced especially in his sympathy for his friend, the prostitute Ann, and for the orphan girl. Of course, his drug use and its mental effects were interesting too, filtered as they were through orientalia and grotesquely beautiful imagery, all interspersed with philosophical ruminations. All these elements combined to give a sense of a troubled but brilliant mind (his syntax was so fine, too, so precise yet poetic). In short, the class whet my appetite for more of the same: complex and disturbing political material packaged in pleasing (to me) aesthetic form.
After finishing up the class, I then took several other Romanticism courses (with Romanticist Ranita Chatterjee), such as a “The Construction of Romanticism: Wordsworth and Shelley” and “The Traumas of the Godwin-Shelley Circle,” and continued to read primary and critical texts during my free time. I read Percy’s “The Mask of Anarchy” and De Quincey’s satirical essay “On Murder Considered as a Fine Art.” As far as criticism, I perused sources diverse in their ideological orientation, such as Wang’s book, M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime: The Romantic Aesthetics of Individuation, and Tilottama Rajan’s Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. These not only helped me engage with the changing conceptions of what constitutes Romantic Literature but also to become aware of the extent to which critical methods enable these and other scholars to read, extend, and problematize Romantic Literature. It seemed to me that Romantic texts were somehow inherently capable of generating new readings, inexhaustible in their capacity to stretch and bend to the probing eyes of scholars who used novel theoretical lens.
Once, while reading Mary Shelley’s The Last Man under a canopied tree on my campus, I had the thought that Romantic Literature, through its aporias–in Mary Shelley’s novel, the narratological disjunction caused by the prologue which mentions that the “last” man’s ensuing narrative is edited by two tourists—was like this organic, mystical clay that continuously took on amorphous shapes, receptive to the critic-claymaker’s deft touch. Yes, I had this very strange thought that is very Romantic and a little screwy. (But it only certifies—makes me certifiable?—that I’m pursuing the right literary period.)
Romanticism, on a bad day, makes me grumble, “These interesting writers are nuts.” On a good day, reading these writers stimulates my own inner-Romantic lunacy.
Work Consulted
McGann, Jerome J. Introduction. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. By McGann Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 1-20. Print.
Stay tuned for Part II…
Some Light Relief, or: Richardson’s Pamela is an Au Pair in 2012
It’s May! And that means that a lot of us academics are taking a deep, post-end-of-term-marking breath, and treating ourselves to the smallest of little vacations… a mini-vaycay, a staycation, an excursion, or what I have recently learned Germans call an Ausflug. In keeping with the theme of respite, here is a little light relief in the form of a pleasant comic fiction. Enjoy!
Richardson’s Pamela is an Au Pair in 2012;
or, Virtue Confounded.
***
In a Series of Letters
from a Hip Young Beauty, To her Parents.
***
Now first Published
In order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Moral Uncertainty
In the Youth of Both Sexes
VANCOUVER
MMX
Dear Mom and Dad,
Seriously bad news: the old lady who owns this joint just bit the dust. I’m getting transferred, and I don’t know if there’ll be a wifi connection at the new house, so hang tight. I can Facebook you from my Blackberry at Starbucks.
Your Dutiful Daughter,
Pamela Andrews
***
Dear Mom and Dad,
As I was closing my laptop, the son of the old lady walks into my room unannounced and scares the %^&* out of me. He’s a total creeper. Must be pushing 40. He just stood there looking at me and smiling. What a weirdo.
Peace Out,
Pamela
***
Dear Mom (just between us),
The creepy son, Mr. B, offered to keep me on for DOUBLE the wages. AND he gave me a gift card for Victoria’s Secret. What should I do?
Kisses,
Pam
P.S. Can you top up my Vi$a? I miss spending quality time with you, and like, shopping. You are the greatest Mom ever : )
***
Dear Mom and Dad,
Mom, your letter made me feel way better about staying. You are right, money doesn’t grow on trees.
Mr. B treats me really well. He gave me some of the old lady’s clothes. VINTAGE cha-CHING! I got 3 pairs of high-waisted dress pants, 4 silk tops with totally retro gold buttons, 1 excellent Valentino dress that I might sell on eBay, 2 cashmere scarves, and Chanel sunglasses. The old lady was RICH. Now I guess it all belongs to Mr. B. …LUCKY!
Your Dutiful Daughter,
Pam xoxox
***
Dear Mom (don’t tell Dad, okay??)
Mr. B was totally hitting on me just like, two seconds ago, when I was walking down the hallway to find a dustpan. He told me I was the most beauteous creature to ever walk the earth, and my eyes were the pillars against which men might build their lives, which I don’t really get but whatevs. Creeper!
Oh em gee.
Pammy
***
Dear Mom,
He kissed me! It just happened!
[This message has been sent via Facebook Mobile]
Your truly shocked daughter,
Pam
***
Dear Mom,
So I was like, OVER the whole thing, because I screamed, and then he kinda yelled, and then I cried, and he gave me permission to never speak to him again, plus he gave me $500 cash, and some new earrings, but THEN. OMG. Then, I was in my room getting ready for bed and I can hear some weird-ass noises coming from the closet. So I open the door and it’s HIM. He’s in MY CLOSET. So I scream some more, and he’s like, “don’t worry, it’s no problem, it’s no problem.” So I was like %^&* you and told him I QUIT.
So there.
Love,
Me, Pamela.
***
Dear Mom,
I can never forgive him for being SO WEIRD, but he has increased my salary and promised I can give notice after the holidays are over. So…
Virtue safe!
Love
Pam
***
Dear Mom,
OMFG I think Mr. B wants to sleep with me. WTF.
FML,
Pam
***
Dear Mom,
If you don’t know what those abbreviations stand for, I can’t tell you.
Love,
Pam
***
Dear Mom,
Today Mr. B came into my room while I was listening to Grizzly Bear and reading Nylon, pinned me to the bed and started kissing me all over my face and neck and I was like, “Back off you Pedophile!” And he was like, “You cannot hold on to your virtue forever! One day, you MUST give yourself up, and because I find you extremely attractive and I have more money than you, it should be to me!” And then he started to unbutton my shirt, and it was kind of hot, but I knew better, because of what happened to the blonde chick on Gossip Girl, so I screamed, “My virtue is all that I have!” And with superhuman strength I threw him off me, ran downstairs, and phoned child protective services.
I’m gonna sue the bastard for all he’s got!
Marriage is for L-O-S-E-R-S,
xoxo
Pamela
On Starting a Reading Group
Once I’d finished my coursework requirements, I found myself really missing the chance to regularly gather with fellow grad students and talk about reading. Studying for exams and writing the dissertation can be isolating experiences. Some large programs may have a few students studying or writing within similar fields, but smaller programs don’t always have this kind of ready-made specialized community. Even so, it can be refreshing to chat analytically and appreciatively about literature with others, even if that literature is outside your particular interests. Aside from just hanging around the office and asking, “Read any good books lately?” the best way I’ve found to foster this type of discussion is to start and join reading groups.
Planning your group:
Numbers are important. If you put out a call for interest and the entire department wants to sign up, you might want to split off into smaller reading groups with narrower topics. I’ve found that between three and ten members is best for good discussion that allows everyone to participate. Choose a location that is comfortable and as far from a classroom as you can get: a more informal building on campus, a café or pub, or even someone’s living room. You’ve all done your time in the classroom, and members will be more likely to show if they don’t feel like someone’s taking attendance. Choosing a day and time when people can feel more relaxed also helps, like a late afternoon after everyone’s taught for the day while still leaving time to do some writing or grading later that night.
There are a number of ways to decide what the group will read. In some reading groups I’ve joined, a group leader knows the most about the topic and just chooses all the readings. If you don’t like a particular reading, you don’t have to show up that day. There are also more diplomatic ways. In my group, I usually ask for suggestions, make a survey of all the responses, and let the group vote on what they want to read. Sometimes, if someone has a text they’re particularly excited or knowledgeable about, he or she can lead that meeting. For the most part, though, discussion seems to run itself, with perhaps a few back-up questions in case of awkward silences. In terms of book-length, everyone is usually pretty busy: shorter is better. Short story collections can work really well if the group chooses one or two to read together, letting members read around the rest of the book if they have the time. It also depends on cost. Department or university funding for reading groups is available at some schools, but not all.
When it comes to the meetings themselves, I really try to emphasize an informal atmosphere, as you can see. Not all groups I’ve been in have been like this, though, and there is something to be said for a structured group in the midst of unstructured diss-writing and exam-studying. Shoot for a middle ground: it’s not the neighborhood book club, but it’s not class, either (especially with so many teachers in the room). One thing that will come as no surprise is that grad students are more likely to show up to any event if there’s food and drink involved. Especially if you have a mix of M.A. and PhD. Students, this informal atmosphere can help everyone feel comfortable contributing to conversation and bring their own interests to the table. You can also do some more creative things like readings of plays/poems or looking at film alongside other texts to make meetings social while still discussing the material. Starting a reading group can help you re-connect with the other scholars in your department, inadvertently bringing out the many different types of reading and discussion that can often be forgotten when you’re doing independent work… while, at the same time, having fun and relaxing with good books, good food, and good people.