Tag Archives: form

Retrospective: “Modern Nature, or, Imagination Revisited” by Anahid Nersessian

Posted on by
Reply

On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 Anahid Nersessian, Assistant Professor at Columbia University, came to give a talk at NYU entitled “Modern Nature, or, Imagination Revisited.”  Her engaging and provocative talk proposed a new formulation of form based on the relationship between ecological disaster and the rise of realism.

While Nersessian provided two intriguing examples in her talk, in her response, Maureen N. McLane, Associate Professor of English at NYU, answered the question of how Nersessian’s formulation might be more widely applied. With examples ranging from the most canonical of Romantic poetry to ancient ballads, McLane illustrated the applicability of Nersessian’s proposed form as an heuristic  of adjustment.

Graduate students from NYU, Stony Brook, and other local NYC universities engaged in a discussion with the professors regarding the theoretical and practical implications of Nersessian’s argument for literary study.

Veronica Goosey

Audience mingles post-discussion. Anahid Nersessian and Maureen McLane center background.

NYURRG Organizer Omar F. Miranda moderated the event.

NYURRG Organizer Randie Sessler engages audience members before the event begins.

Graduate students mingle post-discussion. Cliff Siskin and Anahid Nersessian in left background.

Review: Godwin’s Suspicion of Speech Acts by Angela Esterhammer

Posted on by
1

“William Godwin does not trust words to do things” (553). Thus begins Angela Esterhammer’s compelling article on the political philosopher’s relationship to performative speech acts. As the first line makes clear, Esterhammer is not only engaging with speech acts but also participating in and promoting the larger critical discourse regarding the Romantic era’s preoccupation with the relationship between words and things, or, to borrow language from William Keach, the “thinginess of words.” Drawing on J. L Austin’s landmark How to do Things with Words as well as J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin’s work, Esterhammer examines Godwin’s anxiety regarding words doing things and the way that this anxiety manifests itself in his political writing as well as his novels.

According to Esterhammer, Godwin condemns speech acts and dedicates much of his writing to “showing again and again that disastrous situations come about” because those making pledges, oaths, declarations, promises, and indeed any type of performative utterance can not know what pressure the future will place on such binding speech (555). In other words, temporality troubles all performatives. Esterhammer turns to the chapter “Of Promises” in Political Justice and shows how Godwin’s suspicion of speech acts forms the central tension of his novels Caleb Williams, Clouesley, and Deloraine. Indeed Godwin’s fictions turn on the implications of promises and pledges. Here it is interesting to note that Esterhammer argument could, perhaps, be extended to incorporate Godwin’s dramatic writing as well. Godwin’s 1793 play Antonio; or, The Soldier’s Return: A Tragedy in Five Acts is full of competing vows and pledges that are troubled by unpredictable circumstances.

Perhaps the article’s most provocative claim is Godwin’s reluctant admission that despite the fact performative speech acts should not play a role in constituting “sociopolitical experience,” they remain “inescapable” (562). Although Godwin criticizes the French revolutionaries for falling into the very trap they fought to liberate themselves from by “attempting to legislate for all time,” he cannot seem to shake performative speech acts in his own work (560). In fact, Esterhammer claims, the framing of Godwin’s novels speaks to the looming presence of performatives. The novels not only document performative speech acts between characters but are themselves presented as being constituted by speech acts. That is, Caleb Williams speaks his story in the novel that bears his name. Ultimately, Esterhammer concludes that “in paying such obsessive attention to the way speech acts do construct interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical reality – even if, in Godwin’s opinion, they should not – novels like Cloudesley and Deloraine become profound, early analyses of how things are done with words” (555).

The novel becomes one means for Godwin to expose the problems inherent in performative speech acts even further.

Godwin’s Suspicion of Speech Acts
Angela Esterhammer
Studies in Romanticism , Vol. 39, No. 4, William Godwin (Winter, 2000), pp. 553-578.

–R. A. Sessler

Defining Romanticism

Posted on by
2

Defining Romanticism has long been a conflicted endeavor, with one scholar after another proclaiming the task’s impossibility and offering new definitions. In his book, Romanticism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010), Michael Ferber attempts a definition of Romanticism:

“Romanticism was a European cultural movement, or set of kindred movements, which found in a symbolic and internalized romance plot a vehicle for exploring one’s self and its relationship to others and to nature, which privileged the imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than reason, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural world, which ‘detranscendentalized’ religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul and replaced theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which honored poetry and all the arts as the highest human creations, and which rebelled against the established canons of neoclassical aesthetics and against both aristocratic and bourgeois social and political norms in favor of values more individual, inward, and emotional.”

We are interested in our readers’ thoughts about Ferber’s ambitious attempt. Please submit your own caveats, challenges, and definitions for discussion.

Gentlemanly Furnishings and Textual Liberation

Posted on by
2

In our previous post, Veronica Goosey asked what place cleverness or scholarly play had in academic writing. As my title indicates, I have decided that play should have a more prominent role in my scholarly endeavors.

This post picks up issues of scholarly practice and continues the blog’s larger discussion of media by examining Percy Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo.

The central philosophic debate and its interruption by the figure of the maniac in Shelley’s poem have been the topics of much scholarly commentary. Raymond D. Havens argues that the argument is indeed forgotten and “although the poem continues for a hundred lines after the madman has ceased to speak,” there is “no word concerning the subject of discussion” (649). Charles Robinson claims that the poem displays the poets’ contrasting views regarding the human condition but does not pick a winner. I want to suggest that a close examination of the physical spaces of the poem alters how we are to adjudicate the central debate. The fatalistic Count Maddalo believes that the madhouse functions as a symbol of humanity’s fate. In order to assist the maniac, Maddalo offers gifts that attempt to recreate his own gentlemanly estate. Maddalo provides the maniac with the trappings of a gentleman in the hopes that he will be able to participate in gentlemanly discourse. Julian, on the other hand, offers the maniac something quite different. The narrative account of the maniac captures the madman’s words, allows them to circulate to a wider audience, and provides a type of textual liberation. I hope to show that the maniac’s interruption in Julian and Maddalo should be read as cautionary tale for poets like Maddalo/Byron.

Maddalo’s description of the madhouse plays a crucial role in understanding the central debate regarding free will and freedom in general. Looking out on the madhouse and its tolling belfry, Maddalo says, “And such . . . is our mortality / And this must be the emblem and the sign / Of what should be eternal and divine” (l. 120-122). As Robinson accurately points out, these lines echo Byron’s famous 1816 poem Prometheus. In Byron’s work, Prometheus the demigod functions as an “emblem.” Byron’s speaker calls Prometheus “a symbol and a sign / To Mortals of their fate and force; / Like thee, Man is in part divine, / A troubled stream from a pure source” (l. 45-48). Here, the concept of a divine and predetermined “fate” is at odds with the “force” that mortals possess. In Byron’s poem, Jupiter punishes Prometheus for taking knowledge to Earth and for refusing to tell him the secret of his downfall. The demigod emerges as a powerful representative of fallen mankind because he clings to his mortal “force,” his will. Byron’s speaker closes by claiming that the will can endure torture and never can be killed. Ultimately, the will becomes “Its own concenter’d recompense, / Triumphant where it dares defy, / And making Death a Victory” (l. 57-59). Despite being chained to a rock and tortured, Prometheus’s unwillingness to concede to the demands of Jupiter makes even “Death a Victory.” In Shelley’s poem, Maddalo projects the description of Prometheus onto the madhouse. It is important to recognize that his description comes before the reader has been introduced to the figure of the maniac. Therefore, there is not yet a representative for the madhouse. Instead, the characteristics of Prometheus are part of a particular space. Like the chains that bind Prometheus to the rock, the madhouse and its walls, for Maddalo, represent the “fate” of those who exert their mortal “force.”

The projection of Promethean features onto the madhouse alters the manner in which we should read Maddalo’s gifts to the maniac. Maddalo believes that a change in environment has the potential to improve the maniac. According to Kelvin Everest, “Maddalo attempts to alleviate the maniac’s suffering by creating the illusion of a gentlemanly normality” (682). By providing the maniac with the accoutrements of a gentleman, Maddalo hopes to foster the maniac’s inner gentility: “I fitted up for him / Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim, / And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers” (252-254). The “busts,” “books,” and “urns for flowers,” can help the maniac enter into the type of gentlemanly discourse that Maddalo and Julian represent. In actuality, however, the gifts seem to allow the maniac to play the part of a Byronic hero. Julian and Maddalo first encounter the maniac “sitting mournfully / Near a piano” in his room that overlooks the sea (l. 273-274). Further more, when the maniac starts to speak to himself, Julian claims that “his words came each / Unmodulated, cold, expressionless; / But that from one jarred accent you might guess / It was despair that made them so uniform” (l. 291-294). As the wind howls and a “gusty storm / Hissed through the window,” the maniac’s words acquire a type of uniformity thanks to his “despair” (l. 295-296). Despite the kindness of Maddalo’s gifts, nothing that he offers removes the maniac from the “emblem and the sign” of man’s degraded condition. Rather, Maddalo’s gifts help the maniac better play the part of the brooding and isolated Byronic hero.

If Maddalo gives the maniac the furnishings of a gentleman, what then does Julian offer the slighted lover? Julian’s gift to the maniac is a bit more difficult to locate. I want to suggest that Julian offers the poem itself, thus enabling the maniac’s words to circulate and reach new audiences. In other words, while Maddalo offers material objects to alter a problematic space, Julian’s narrative offers a type of figurative liberation. According to Everest, “The maniac has two audiences in the poem; the absent ex-lover that his speech is addressed to, and the unseen Julian and Maddalo who overhear him” (681). Julian and Maddalo the poem, on the other hand, has the potential to reach a much wider audience. Publication of the poem also undoes some of the maniac’s melancholic proclamations. The maniac can no longer speak his soliloquies or “hide” beneath “words like embers” (l. 503-504). Instead, his story circulates beyond the confines of the emblematic madhouse and functions as a type of cautionary tale. But who, then, is the target audience for Shelley’s words of warning? Interestingly, the largest clue comes from Maddalo. It is Maddalo who provides the concluding summation of the encounter with the maniac. After returning home, Maddalo says, “Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song” (l. 544-546). Maddalo seems to be describing a poet who, at least in part, resembles Byron. A poet who would compose a work that, like Prometheus, treats fate and the human will as competing forces and imagines confinement as fallen mankind’s inevitable lot. The maniac exhibits traits and inhabits a space that better reflect Maddalo’s situation than that of Julian.

Julian’s pledge to discover himself by studying Maddalo seems to collapse the two figures together and challenge the suggestion that the maniac’s story is a warning to poets like Maddalo/Byron. Everest argues that Julian chooses to “aspire” to “the life of Maddalo” rather than the life of the maniac (683). However, Julian’s final decision is not a simple binary with the maniac and Maddalo providing two different ways of proceeding. Before he makes his pledge to find himself in his friend, Julian imagines himself staying in Venice because “books are there, / Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair” (l. 554-555). It is important to recognize that this list of items is similar to the gentlemanly gifts that Maddalo gives to the maniac. Julian goes on to picture himself sitting alongside Maddalo in his “great palace” (l. 559). Julian does not simply want to emulate Maddalo but rather learn his ways in order to “reclaim him from his dark estate” (my emphasis, l. 574). In other words, Julian wants to remove Maddalo from the type of environment that he currently occupies. He believes that his presence and conversation have the potential bring about some change and “reclaim” Maddalo from his “dark estate.”

Maddalo offers gentlemanly gifts that simply recapitulate his own situation. While the markers of gentlemanly status help spruce up the maniac’s environment, they do not remove him from the confines of the madhouse. Julian, in contrast, creates a poem that allows the maniac’s words to escape the walls of the asylum. The poem transforms the maniac’s soliloquies into poetry and allows his words to circulate to a much wider audience. The absent ex-lover and the hidden Julian and Maddalo are not the only ones who are able to hear his woeful words. Julian sees the maniac’s story not as a warning against his own theories, but an exaggerated endpoint of Maddalo’s fatalism. Ultimately, Julian seeks to liberate both the maniac and Maddalo from the confines of their respective situations.

Works Cited

Everest, Kelvin. “Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. p. 675-683.

Havens, Raymond D. “Julian and Maddalo.” Studies in Philology 27.4 (Oct. 1930), 648-653.

Lord Byron. Lord Byron: The Major Works. Ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Robinson, Charles. Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Shelley, Percy. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002.

R. A. Sessler

Review: Charm, or de casibus Literary Scholarship?

Posted on by
1

Hadley J. Mozer “‘Ozymandias,’ or de Casibus Lord Byron: Literary Celebrity on the Rocks.” European Romantic Review 21.6 (2010):727-749.

Hadley Mozer’s article arguing that Shelley’s sonnet should be read as a lecture to Byron on the vanity of his celebrity won Article of the Year at the 2010 NASSR conference. I attended the conference, and heard several highly complimentary things said of the piece. So when I returned to the article to study its merits more closely, I was somewhat surprised.
The first surprise—a pleasant one—was finding the cleverness of the title recurring throughout the essay. The writing is playful, witty, and a pleasure to read. But despite the charm of Mozer’s wordplay, I found myself not only unconvinced by Mozer’s argument, but convinced that it was a stretch. Mozer’s argument that Shelley experienced a sense of inferiority to Byron in the late 18-teens was well-researched, well-argued, and not, I would think, particularly controversial. Locating in ‘Ozymandias’ an early start to Shelley’s poetic engagements with Byron seemed an intriguing prospect, but the evidence Mozer presents in letters and other poems provide at best circumstantial support. Mozer’s shift to critical interest in identifying the Shelley’s source for the “shattered visage” provides a wealth of historical detail and successfully engages it to disprove earlier claims, and support the interpretation that Shelley’s statuary remains are not based on any actual Egyptian statuary.
Mozer’s archival work is impressive, but the leap from “not based on Egyptian statuary” to “based on Byronic portraits” is questionable. Byron’s poetry, portraits, and bust, along with their reproductions, provide ample evidence that one public version of Byron, the arrogant, brooding Byronic hero, has features which resemble Shelley’s poetic description of the statue of Ozymandias. But Mozer’s claim that this resemblance is the result of Shelley’s attempt to “Byronize” the pharoah in order to critique the poet is problematic. The pharoah’s obessions with monuments to himself could plausibly evoke the image-management in which Byron engaged, but only if we accept Mozer’s claim that Shelley “Byronizes” the statue of Ozymandias, which I found to be the article’s weakest claim, seductive though it was.
Similarly, the genre argument that this ekphrastic sonnet should be read as a de casibus poem held some appeal initially, but the connections between “Ozymandias” and a form of history writing and moral instruction long associated with tragedy are not as strong as one woule hope. Perhaps further research will strengthen what appears in this article as an intriguing possibility. But by Mozer’s own acknowledgement, Shelley departs from de casibus tradition in so many ways, it seems as though any influence the genre might have had on the poem was not enough to merit the claim that the sonnet is a de casibus poem. Mozer’s argument that Byron at least may have read it in this fashion, as supported by the end of canto 1 of Don Juan, is excitingbut under-investigated.
Mozer’s essay demonstrates exemplary writing and research, and the argument itself is provacative, if not entirely persuasive. If “Ózymandias” is indeed “a veiled de casibus meditation on the vanity of Byron’s literary celebrity,” I would argue that the veil is quite thick (743). Yet if, as article of the year, this essay represents the work Romanticists want to see in journal publications, then there are several implications for graduate students. Here are a few: 1) Make a bold claim; 2) Integrate archival research; and, 3) Be playful.
A bold claim should be plausible and provocative, but needn’t necessarily be proven—or even provable. Our job isn’t so much to solve a problem, but to lay out a problem’s parameters and poke around its implications. The more boldly you do that, the more interesting the essay is to read, as long as you have sufficient support.
In answer to that caveat is point two: archival research. We all love it. Finding unusual or neglecting archival materials is a favorite tactic among scholars in the humanties. Applying such texts to a problem and integrating them into an ongoing scholarly debate is highly attractive. Half the seduction of Mozer’s article, for me at least, comes from the manner in which archival research is integrated into the argument.
Charm is also seductive. The more fun it is to read an article, the more seductive the argument appears. An argument may be rich in data supporting a claim which could change the course of literary scholarship, but the accessibility of the argument makes it readable and widens its circulation. In this case, I would argue that the wit and charm of the writing makes it a more appealing read than the argument merits, but this only showcases my own claim—that allowing yourself to be witty and playful in your writing will make your argument more attractive to your readership.

Veronica Goosey

If you have a response to Mozer’s article or our review, please do chime in.