Seminars provide the rare opportunity to discuss the pre-circulated works-in-progress of exemplary scholars. Pre-registration is required, with seminars capped at 25-30 participants.
ALAN BEWELL, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: "Traveling Natures." Seminar sponsored by the English Dept. of Northwestern U
Moderator: Andrew Elfenbein (English, U of Minnesota)
This essay, which is part of a book on Romanticism and colonial natural history, seeks to provide a different way of looking at nature during this period. Instead of adopting the conventional view that nature is a stable, enduring phenomenon, it will argue that there were many natures at this time and that what was perhaps most characteristic about them, what made them as modern as the societies that emerged with them, is that they traveled. Instead of thinking about nature as being rooted in place, this essay will examine the globalized "routing" of new natures to new places. Its goal is to complicate our understanding of the physical world introduced by colonialism, one in which native biota struggled to live with plants and animals that had come from afar. The new natures of the Romantic period now included immigrant populations and cosmopolitan natures. If we are to understand why writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries talked so much about nature at this time, we need to consider in more concrete ways what was happening to the nature around them.
ROSS CHAMBERS, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF FRENCH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN: "'Musique savante': Poetry as Figure, Fabrication, Fetish." Seminar sponsored by the French section of Purdue's Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Moderator: Thomas Broden (Foreign Languages and Literatures, Purdue U)
This essay attempts to bring together two strands of my current thinking, one of which has to do with what I see as a "figural" turn in modern poetry (as opposed to poetry as a "mimetic" practice), while the other concerns the fictions of fabricated (rather than artificial) life of which E.T.A. Hoffmann and Mary Shelley provided the prototypes. I argue that a dynamics of unsatisfied desire is crucial to an aesthetics of the figural/ the fabricated/ the contrived, and that an interest in the (domestic) everyday provides a key to that dynamics as it works itself out in figural poetry and the fiction of fabricated life. That figural poetry amounts to a fetishization of the everyday is the proposition I am working towards. I discuss, too briefly, poems by Chris Andrews (a contemporary Australian poet), Rimbaud and Gautier; and three narratives: "Der Sandmann," Frankenstein, and Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake. The topic relates obliquely to the questions of scientia and techne. The French phrase in the title is from Rimbaud: "La musique savante manque à notre désir" (very roughly: Contrived music fails our desire).
MARY FAVRET, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, INDIANA UNIVERSITY: "Telling Time in Wartime " Seminar sponsored by the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Moderator: Kevin Gilmartin (English, California Institute of Technology)
My project considers British Romanticism as wartime writing, in order to trouble understanding of both Romanticism and wartime as they unfold in the modern era, under the awareness of total warfare. This seminar focuses on the difficulty of telling time in wartime, where "wartime" comprehends the felt senses of temporality available to the British public that were shaped by and in response to a prolonged and distant world war. Caught between anticipation and belatedness, alarm and anomie, with nation and possibly world unmoored from their constructed history and plotted future, romantic writers devised techniques to tell and riddle the time of war. These undermine "the historian's code" even as they confront war, the subject most familiar to the practice of history.
SONIA HOFKOSH, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, TUFTS UNIVERSITY: "What Does a Fetish Want?" Seminar sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters of the University of Notre Dame
Moderator: Laura George (English, Eastern Michigan U)
The title of this seminar invokes both Freud's famous query about female desire and W.J.T. Mitchell's recent adaptation of it relative to visual images in order to posit a set of questions about materiality and agency in paradigmatic formulations of romantic poetics. Part of a book in progress on the signifying function of domestic objects in British culture during the several generations before the Great Exhibition, the essay will seek to trace the efficacy of things in poetic production, especially as it is characterized by Coleridge in terms of instrumentality (such as, for example, in the problematic figure of the aeolian harp). The instrument as creativity's enabling tool or technique—like metaphor—also defines specific possibilities and exerts specific pressures on the subject it is meant simply to express. Perhaps in this way necessarily aberrant or perverse, fetishism will appear here to describe the very logic of a romantic aesthetic that accommodates subjects to distraction by and in objects.
TIMOTHY MORTON, PROFESSOR OF LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS: "Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics." Seminar sponsored by the English Dept. of Loyola U
Moderator: Karen Weisman (English, U of Toronto)
This seminar is based on my book of the same title (Harvard, forthcoming). The basic thesis is that you can have ecology only if you give up the idea of nature. Romantic forms of environmentalism have not prepared us well for this seeming paradox, and yet Romantic literature can offer us ways of understanding it better. Human beings are entering a drastic new phase of politics, culture and philosophy, in which getting used to what is meant by ecology without nature will be one of their main tasks. We will be looking at literature, art and music in order to figure out why. The seminar will include exploration of environmental rhetoric, and in particular the "ambience" that underwrites, and undermines, this rhetoric. It will also include a study of Hegel's notion of the beautiful soul, which I read as symptomatic of a certain kind of environmentalism and Romanticism.
JUDITH PASCOE, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA : "Siddons Speaks! Theatre Voices and Recorded Memory." Seminar sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters of the University of Notre Dame
Moderator: Jason Goldsmith (English, Butler U)
My essay is part of a book manuscript which resurrects the lost voice of the romantic period's greatest actress by analyzing how that voice was trained, admired, preserved, and memorialized. Siddons died long before Thomas Edison started collecting luminaries for his Library of Voices, but her fans tried to capture her vocal cadences far in advance of phonograph recording. Edison was intent on preserving sounds that were most in danger of being lost—for example, the last words of dying persons. Early nineteenth-century theatre commentary shares this preoccupation with the voice's impermanence. Actors, especially as they aged and retired from the stage, inspired a flurry of musings on the impossibility of capturing their performances. The belief in a fundamental unrecordability advanced Siddonian myth making, and also, years later, haunted sound recording technology. Even if a recorded voice was an exact replica of the original one, its detachment created listening possibilities that were entirely distinct from the original's aural context. I address these dilemmas by examining nascent "recordings" of Siddons's voice, as well as mournful accounts of that voice's decay.
THOMAS PFAU, EADS FAMILY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND PROFESSOR OF GERMAN, DUKE UNIVERSITY: “Whatever Happened to the Theory of Romanticism? On the Intellectual and Institutional Costs of Particularist and Miniaturist Forms of Criticism.” Seminar sponsored by the German section of Purdue's Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures and by the College of Arts and Letters of the University of Notre Dame
Moderator: Beate Allert (Foreign Languages and Literatures, Purdue U)
This essay seeks to reconsider the place of Romanticism within European Modernity. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the lines of demarcation between Romanticism and the apparent excesses of mid- to late-Eighteenth-century revolutionary, rationalist, and materialist utopias, Romantic studies has largely lost sight of how its central period fits into the bigger time-frame of European modernity (~1500-1900). So as to reopen this bigger question with the needed specificity, I will focus on some recurrent, formal-rhetorical characteristics of Romantic narrative, each in its way symptomatic of the period's crucial, if agonistic, transitional position within the process of European modernity, particularly the quintessentially modern quest for cohesive and conclusive forms of self-description and self-legitimation. There will be three sections to my paper: 1) a reevaluation of the thesis (most conspicuously advanced by M. H. Abrams) that Romanticism amounts to a pervasive and momentous period of secularization; 2) the emergence of a new aesthetic and perceptual framework—that of phantasmagoria—for accessing and grasping the Romantic 'real'; and 3) Romanticism's ideological bequests to the nineteenth century, e.g. nihilism, anarchism, pessimism, skepticism, proto-existentialism.
Seminars provide the rare opportunity to discuss the pre-circulated works-in-progress of exemplary scholars. Pre-registration is required, with seminars capped at 25-30 participants.
TIMOTHY BARRINGER, PAUL MELLON PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY, YALE UNIVERSITY: "Sonic Spectacles of Empire: the Audio-Visual Nexus, Delhi -- London, 1911-12 " Seminar sponsored by the Victorian Studies Program of Indiana University
Moderator: Anne Helmreich (Art History, Case Western Reserve U)
This seminar will refocus on the intersection between the auditory and the visual in the perception and construction of imperial culture. While some work has been done on visual cultures of empire, its aural dimensions have been neglected, and the appeal to the ears, as well as the eyes, in imperial pageantry remains a largely unexplored problem. At issue in the seminar will be the evidential and interpretative challenges involved in writing an experiential history incorporating both hearing and sight, a history of sensory affect and response. The paper to be circulated examines durbars and pageants, cultural forms in which imperialism achieved a heightened cultural impact through the performance which appealed simultaneously to sight and hearing, at the fulcrum of the aural and the visual. Focusing on the 1912 Delhi Durbar, which I read as the culmination of a set of Victorian imperial practices, I argue that spectacles of empire produced the illusion of sublimity and permanence precisely through a meeting of music and image.
TRACY DAVIS, BARBER PROFESSOR OF PERFORMING ARTS, PROFESSOR ENGLISH AND THEATRE, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY: "What Are Fairies For?" Seminar sponsored by the Theater section of Purdue's Dept. of Visual and Performing Arts and the Dept. of English of Indiana University
Moderator: Kari Lokke (English, U of California, Davis)
While it is relatively clear what theatrical fairies shared with their counterparts in folklore, poetry, and painting of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, this essay concerns the theatre’s reflection of contemporaneous fairy ethnography. Ethnographers observed that fairy folk were fast deserting the British Isles as a consequence of urban expansion, industrial encroachment on the countryside, loss of traditional rural folkways, and ecological degradation, yet in the theatre the intercultural encounters between humans and fairies remained vitally alive, and in a notable array of genres. Ethnography and theatre both set aside questions of belief – or doubt – in fairies to challenge how the unseeable can be sought, known, and rendered, provoking fundamental questions about memory as knowledge, the durability of a mortal life span, and cultural tradition. As such, the theatrical presentation of fairies expressed sociopolitical concerns at the very heart of the British nation – who suffers in the wake of progress, is it too late to turn back, and does the irrational have a place in national identity – in a visual and aural sensescape capable of producing profound affective responses from adult theatregoers.
REGENIA GAGNIER, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF EXETER: " The Relationship of Part to Whole ." Seminar sponsored by the Department of English of the University of Chicago
The psychologist Havelock Ellis analysed Decadence in 1889 as when the individuation of parts led to the disintegration of the whole, and a Decadent style in literature as an anarchistic style in which everything was sacrificed to the development of the individual parts. Whether one thought this sacrifice of whole to the development of the part was a sign of Degeneration, or, as I think, of wide-ranging thought-experiments on the limits of self and other, this was the key tension of the period. Stylistically, how did the deep internality or particular perspective of a narrator or character relate to the larger, more social structures of plot or narrative? Socially, how did individual needs and desires relate to the needs and desires of others? And how did nations or states relate to other nations or states? This tension of independence versus interdependence, specifically of individual development threatening the survival of the whole, constituted the anxiety of liberalism after a century of its development, and was the fin de siècle's major contribution to modernism. The book of which this chapter is a draft Introduction traces models of part to whole from Millian liberalism to the early twentieth century: as individual to dyad (couples, parent/child in women's literature), individual to group (Arts and Crafts circles, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Engels-Marx-Aveling circle, Gypsies), and individual or nation in relation to the world—cosmopolitanism or world citizenship. Using state-of-the-art philosophy of science, especially integrative systems biology, it then proposes new models, not based in individualism, to understand relationship.
ADELA PINCH, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN: "'The Omnipotence of Thought': Ideas About Psychological Causality in Nineteenth-Century Britain." Seminar sponsored by the Center for Advanced
Studies and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Moderator: Athena Vrettos (English, Case Western Reserve U)
This essay is part of a larger project on beliefs about the act of thinking about another person, which seeks to understand the conditions under which nineteenth-century writers found it possible, or desirable, to imagine that thinking about another person could harm him or her. Above all, I am interested in how a concern about the practice of thinking about another person took shape through nineteenth-century literary forms. While much of my project focuses on poetry, this essay, which poses itself as a kind of literary prehistory of Freud's concept of the "omnipotence of thought" (Totem and Taboo, 1913), focuses on a novel Freud knew well, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. It examines Daniel Deronda as a meditation on the different ways in which thinking about another person might be a substantial form of action in the world (as distinct from, say, sympathetic communion or mind reading), and ponders what this proposition might have to do with the form of the realist novel.
LEAH PRICE, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: " Reader’s Block: Trollope and the Book as Prop." Seminar sponsored by the Dept. of English and the Victorian Studies Program of Indiana University
Moderator: Rebecca Stern (English, U of South Carolina)
The book in progress from which this chapter is drawn asks how Victorian culture in general, and the realist novel in particular, define the relation between the text (as a linguistic structure) and the book (as an object or a commodity). More specifically, it tries to explain why Victorian writers had such a hard time keeping those two terms in play at once: why when the book-object is represented it's rarely being read, while whenever reading is in fact going on, the material book gets reduced to a metaphor, a distraction, or a joke. My subtext, as any reader will guess, is to excavate usable models for rethinking the relation of literary criticism to book history (crudely: for making the latter more than a service industry for the former), and a subset of that subtext is to remap the relation between social practices (usually reading) and material culture (usually books). Because those practices and that culture both look "other" to formalist or at least textualist literary criticism, the act of reading often gets lumped together with the book-object often get lumped. "The history of books and reading" is now a disciplinary catchphrase. The Victorians tended to replace that "and" by an "or," pitting the representation of material objects against the representation of interiority. If the former is epitomized by the book-object, the latter manifests itself most characteristically (and therefore least visibly) in the act of reading. Why, this chapter asks, does representing the act of reading mean abstracting the visible book? Conversely, why does representing the book (or the newspaper, or the magazine) mean reducing reading itself to an act?
MARJORIE STONE, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND WOMEN'S STUDIES, DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY: "Victorian Poetry in the Archive: Theory, Practice, and Challenges." Seminar sponsored by the English Dept. of the U of Illinois, Chicago
Moderator: Antony H. Harrison (English, North Carolina State U)
"There is no political power without control of the archive," Derrida observes in Archive Fever. While much recent scholarship (e.g., the NINES project) concerns open-use digital archives, this seminar will explore archive theories as they apply to research in archives and special collections, resources that are increasingly under-utilized in a digital age. What are the key methodological challenges associated with research in Victorian poetry archives? How do archival materials contribute to our understanding of the creative process and of historical contexts? What scholarly risks and gains are associated with "archive fever": in Derrida's words, that burning "passion" and "nostalgic desire for the archive" as a "place of absolute commencement"? In what ways have celebrity culture and the cult of the "solitary genius" led to a fetishization of holograph manuscripts, contributing to their dispersal into inaccessible private collections or formidable permissions fees? How often do archival materials reveal collaborations obscured by the paradigm of the unitary author? Are misattributions frequent in interpreting literary remains? What dimensions of print and manuscript archives do we risk losing with the shift to the differing data architecture of digital archives? While the essay for this seminar will take its principal examples from the Browning archives (particularly the dismembered literary remains of Elizabeth Barrett Browning), I invite other scholars to collaborate in a discussion that will bring many other examples to the table.
MARTIN WIENER, PROFESSOR AND MARY GIBBS JONES CHAIR IN HISTORY, RICE UNIVERSITY: "Probing the Fault Lines of Imperial Authority: Inter-Racial Murder Trials in British India, 1890-93 ." Seminar sponsored by the Department of History and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Moderator: Whitney Walton (History, Purdue U)
The uniform and equal "rule of law" was perhaps the most cherished justification of British imperial rule; racial discrimination was one of the chief indictments brought against it. What happened when a killing of a Briton by an Indian or an Indian by a Briton brought the two faces of empire into direct confrontation? This paper explores the clash of the two faces of British imperialism through the close reading of several murder trials. Through the realm of the historical particular it also seeks to throw light on the perennial question of how to reconcile "liberal" political values with the hard realities of exercising power in the world.
Workshops are discussion groups that reflect on a particular topic or text. Run by leading scholars in Romantic studies, they provide an opportunity to return to graduate school's seminar environment, surrounded by some of the best students you've ever seen. Pre-registration is required, with workshops capped at 25-30 participants.
KEVIN GILMARTIN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: "Radicalism and Reaction in the Long Counterrevolution." Workshop sponsored by the Ellen Brown Fund of the Dept. of English at Michigan State U
Moderator: Jonathan Sachs (English, Concordia U)
How do we identify radical or conservative qualities in romantic-period writers, texts, and cultural movements? What do we mean when we use terms like opposition, complicity, or resistance in our criticism? Older conceptions of romanticism as an aesthetic revolt against established conventions seem largely to have passed. And it may be that the familiar interpretive strategy of measuring political disposition against some known standard has become problematic, since our usual touchstones (Paine, Burke, the LCS, the Cheap Repository, Cobbett, Blackwood's ) are themselves complicated and ambiguous, and now often serve as the subject of (rather than context for) interpretive analysis. My own occasion for opening these questions will be material from William Hazlitt's 1819 Political Essays (the Preface, "On Court Influence," "What is the People?"). While Hazlitt tends to enforce strict political distinctions in his ruthless pursuit of apostates and renegadoes, on many topics (Burke, Shelley, the urban crowd, religious Dissent, 1688) he troubles a simply polarized conception of the political field. But I hope participants will come to the workshop with issues from their own reading and research, to facilitate a broad critical and methodological discussion of the politics of romantic-period culture. So for example, while acute post-Waterloo disenchantment meant that Hazlitt privileged counterrevolutionary developments, the romantic period was equally pivotal for the emergence of the modern constitutional state (itself liberating? or disciplinary?), and it may be that other material and topics (theater, empire, science) require other political frames.
ANDREA HENDERSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE: "Problems of Ontology in Early Writings on Photography." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Michigan
Moderator: Geraldine Friedman (English, Purdue U)
In this workshop we will focus on what might be called the early-nineteenth-century theory of photography; that is, we will examine early photographic experimentation not by way of its subject matter or achieved results but as it was conceived and described by such pioneers as Wedgwood, Talbot, Herschel, and others. We will pay particular attention to the language of latency, ephemerality, opposition, and reversal—what might be called the anti-essentialist language—that shaped the early discourse on photography. Our primary document will be Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, but we will also trace these issues as they arise in S. T. Coleridge's late writings, the photographs of Clementina, Lady Hawarden, and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.
JON KLANCHER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY: "The Sociology of a Phrase: 'Arts & Sciences.'" Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Michigan
Moderator: Denise Gigante (English, Stanford U)
Through the eighteenth century, as recent work by Richard Yeo and others has shown, the phrase "arts & sciences" appeared mainly in the genres of print culture (encyclopedias, dictionaries, essays, etc.). From the late 1790s to the 1840s, however, a remarkable transformation took place in the meaning, structure, and British institutional configuration of both categories: both individually and in relation to one another. This workshop will consider a very different British institutionalization of "arts & sciences" in this period than the one we associate with German universities and the modern curriculum that has since appealed to German precedent. For Britain, the "arts & sciences" would be reconfigured in a metropolitan matrix of lecturing, research, teaching, and public sociability—at the Royal, British, Surrey, and other new Institutions—that lends a fresh perspective on today's troubled relationship between institutional education and the power of markets. The workshop will consider texts that articulated, contested, or complicated the emerging relation of "arts & sciences" as well as recent scholarship (mostly in art history and the history of sciences): writers of the period include the chemist Humphry Davy, the architect John Soane, the bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the painter Prince Hoare, the institution-builder Thomas Bernard, as well as David Hume, Samuel Coleridge, and William Hazlitt. We will also think about cultural theory's concept of "fields" in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and relevant scholarship by John Brewer, James Secord, and Gillian Russell. What we have recently learned to call the "sociology of culture" is a perspective needing greater nuance and specificity about the evolution of knowledge fields in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This workshop is meant to pursue that understanding by building on scholarship in several disciplines and some suggestive cultural theory.
CELESTE LANGAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: "Rhythm Science: Number, Weight, and Measure in the Romantic Period." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Michigan
Moderator: Jason Camlot (English, Concordia U)
Thus the abstract idea of TIME, though it be not the object of any of our senses, and no image can properly be made of it, yet because it has a relation to quantity, and we can say a greater or less space of time, it admits of a natural and easy representation in our minds by the idea of a measurable space, and particularly that of a LINE; which, like time, may be extended in length, without giving any idea of breadth or thickness. (Joseph Priestley, Description of a Chart of Biography [1765])
I have two ambitions for this workshop. One is to engage participants in a discussion of transformations in the science(s) of number in the Romantic period—especially those describable as "metrology." In 1791 the French revoked the "metrical privileges" of the nobility and instituted a new metric system deriving units of measure from "nature." The Romantic period also saw the invention of the metronome (Maelzel, 1814) and the first timelines (Priestley) and statistical graphs (William Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas [1786]). If the metronome allowed regulation of the short interval, the various "historical atlases" of the period mapped world history as a time-series of longer intervals; Priestley comments, "It is plain that if a sheet of paper be divided into equal spaces, to denote centuries, or other intervals, it will be a chart truly representing a certain portion of universal time." What are we to make of these attempts to render mathematical information about measurable intervals visible, to make such information available "at one view" (Priestley), to "speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind" (Playfair)? The second aim is more speculative: to consider ways in which mathematical innovations in measurement may illuminate correlative innovations in poetic measure. What is the status of the line in Romantic poetry—is it a measure of time, or a geometrical figure?
DEIDRE LYNCH, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, INDIANA UNIVERSITY: "Anecdotal Knowing: Personalization and Romantic-Period Practices of Literary History." Workshop sponsored by the Ellen Brown Fund of the Dept. of English at Michigan State U
Moderator: Laura Mandell (English, Miami U)
One way that we have learned to tell the story of the Romantic-period rise of literary history—of the gradual development in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain of new knowledge practices centered on the literary past—is as a story of professionalization. The labors of researching, reading, and remembering the vernacular tradition came to be recognized as activities that demanded specialist expertise, that manifested the epoch's emerging ideals of empirical objectivity and disinterestedness, and that possessed public utility. In this workshop, the antiquarianism and anecdote-collecting of Isaac D'Israeli will provide us—especially once we juxtapose D'Israeli's Dissertation on Anecdotes with Thomas De Quincey's "Wordworth"—with the test case that we will use to investigate whether personalization might, as much as professionalization, also have a storyline. D'Israeli and De Quincey can help us to ponder how English studies came into being as a discipline whose claims to objectivity, or even to having "an" object, would seem perpetually problematic. They can help us to remark the tensions between literary history's ideals of erudition and its aspirations to affective proximity ("close reading"), and the tensions between those acts of transmission—anthologizing, quoting—that preserve cultural memory and the alternative, privatizing versions of transmission that activate the nostalgic logic of the personal souvenir.
GHISLAINE MCDAYTER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY: "Mobs, Madness and Masculinity." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Iowa
Moderator: Lisa Surridge (English, U of Victoria)
By its whimsy, its revolting docility, its credulity, its nervousness, its brusque psychological leaps from fury to tenderness, from exasperation to laughter, the crowd is feminine, even when it is composed, as is usually the case, of males. (Gabriel Tarde)
This passage from Tarde's L'Opinion et la foule (1922) represents the typical modern view of how unruly crowds behave: they are feminized, irrational, and hysterical. This workshop will examine the transformation of the "political crowd" into the "hysterical mob" in the nineteenth century and how the concept of the mob provides the cultural context for the modern evolution of celebrity and the "fan." We will examine how anxieties about the power of the "mob" shifted as a heterosexist political phenomenon into a homosexual cultural one and how these changes are linked to the commodification of literary production and the birth of psychoanalysis. Using Freud, Adorno, Le Bon, Taine and Trotter, we will also explore how this change brought together issues of gender normativity, sexual aberrance, madness, fame, and identity formation—all in relation to the controlling "spell" of the author.
DANIEL O'QUINN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF ENGLISH AND THEATRE STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH: "Spectacular Technologies: Pizarro and the Perilous Bridge between Tragic Emotion and Visual Excess." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Iowa and the Theater section of Purdue's Dept. of Visual and Performing Arts
Moderator: Julie Carlson (English, U of California, Santa Barbara)
Even a brief perusal of the daily papers from the spring of 1799 indicates that Sheridan's Pizarro was arguably the most successful suturing of spectacular technology and tragic acting technique in the history of eighteenth-century theatre. Spectacle in Pizarro often clinches the elicitation of tragic emotion and yet, like all supplemental relationships, it also undoes the play's cathartic claims. It is my contention that this singular relationship between spectacle and tragedy makes Pizarro an important test case for thinking about the relationship between aesthetics, politics and sociability in the Romantic period. This workshop explores the play's seemingly contradictory political and aesthetic claims by attending closely not only to the divergent allegorical possibilities afforded by its narrative, but also to how visual spectacle mediates between what Victor Turner describes as "aesthetic dramatic processes and sociocultural processes in a given place and time." The workshop will feature an on-line archive of para-theatrical materials for participants' consideration. It is my hope that these texts and images will allow members of the workshop to fully explore the implications of the famous bridge scene from Act V and move outward to some general propositions regarding the politics of performance in the late 1790s.
Workshops are discussion groups that reflect on a particular topic or text. Run by leading scholars in Victorian studies, they provide an opportunity to return to graduate school's seminar environment, surrounded by some of the best students you've ever seen. Pre-registration is required, with workshops capped at 25-30 participants.
ALISON BOOTH, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: "Literature Travels, but Authors Are Always at Home." Workshop sponsored by the Ellen Brown Fund of the Dept. of English at Michigan State U
Moderator: Mary Elizabeth Leighton (English, U of Victoria)
This workshop is intended to have a broad sweep—through the English-speaking world and through forms of writing that used to be designated “literature,” including travels. Yet it should lead us into some tight spots or out-of-the-way places, such as authors’ graves, studies or favorite walks. The general theme is literature and travel: travel narratives, travel in pursuit of literary sites or authors, and the transportation of publications and authors among countries. What were the conditions of travel and travel writing at different stages of the nineteenth century? Large numbers of Victorian writers traveled to promote their past writing, broadcast their reputation, and collect material for a new travel book, while others traveled to recuperate between projects. The distribution of writing was, willy-nilly, international. Yet this was a period that drew stricter borders of national literatures and began systematically to locate authors in residence, as if they were oracles attached to one shrine. Readers in increasing numbers traveled to locations associated with literature, uniting pilgrimage with tourism. Essays in magazines and collections showed the way to literary landscapes and regions, and honed in on certain houses where an author might be met, living or dead. While my own research centers on literary tourism and "homes and haunts" publications, participants may want to focus on the afterlife of Romantic or earlier travel; travel, tourism, or pilgrimage as themes in writings of various genres; colonial and imperial dimensions of travel writing; guidebooks, historic preservation, collections, exhibits, or monuments as motives for travel; international publishing practices in relation to travel; such intersections of transportation and genre as the railway novel; or other dimensions of cultural heritage as they expanded during the period.
Read: James T. Fields, "Our Whispering Gallery XII," Atlantic Monthly 28 (1871): 750-758 (on portraits and visits to Wordsworth and Mary Russell Mitford). The article, consisting of portraits and visits to William Wordsworth and Mary Russell Mitford, is accessible at Cornell’s Making of America, through an advanced, bibliographic search for “Whispering Gallery” (title) (author is listed as Jas T. Fields): http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_adv.html
Field’s serialized sketches were reprinted with additional material in Yesterdays with Authors (1871; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900); libraries may own a copy of this book. Wordsworth and Mitford have separate chapters.
Recommended reading: Dean MacCannell, The Tourist; James Buzard, The Beaten Track; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees
ANNA CLARK, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND SAMUEL RUSSELL CHAIR IN THE HUMANITIES, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: "Gender, Empire and Governmentality." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Michigan
Moderator: Melinda Zook (History, Purdue U)
Two concepts of the individual competed with each other within nineteenth-century governmentality: the Benthamite notion of the individual subjected to institutional discipline, and John Stuart Mill's liberal individual, whose spontaneous self-will enabled him to govern himself. First, how did different social actors challenge the Benthamite idea of discipline? For instance, female poor law reformers and Irish Catholic clerics depicted the poor law as a "cold hard machine" and advocated family-type care for pauper children in order to "individuate" them. Second, how did these social actors apply this "individuation" to subjects not usually considered to be liberal individuals, such as former slaves in the West Indies, Hindu widows, Indian child brides, or Irish workhouse girls? Were these social actors producing their own forms of discipline? Third, how did the concept of governmentality play out in imperial settings? How did institutional discipline work in tandem with violence, patronage, and sectarianism in colonial modernity? Fourth, what techniques did the subjects of this discipline use to resist? violence? reverse discourses? collective movements? Participants are encouraged to bring in their own research and ideas concerning these topics.
JULIE CODELL, PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY, SCHOOL OF ART, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY: "Reading the Maharaja's Body: Photographs of the Indeterminate Empire." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Michigan
The subjects of Victorian visuality and colonial photography have both had increasing attention, but still remain largely distinct. I would like to suggest bringing these areas of study together. Using a few colonial photographs of Indian maharajas, I will explore how visual conventions borrowed from painting can create dislocations of space and identities through a pastiche which disrupts photographic meanings of colonized subjects-as-objects and of photography as "real." Photographed bodies and props (what Arjun Appadurai calls "counter-texts") in the contexts of imperial policy and invented traditions become sites of negotiations over identities, counter-identities and self-fashionings. Official photographic portraits of maharajas of the Native States (who were so important to Raj governance of British India) were commissioned for three coronation durbars held in Delhi (1877, 1903, 1911) to proclaim the British monarch empress or emperor of India. These two-week long spectacles initiated a modern aestheticization of state politics deployed in visuals (painting, press illustration, photography, postcards, film) and literature (travel narratives, journalism, life writings, histories and official durbar books). Read "postcolonially," maharajas' photo portraits produced for these durbar spectacles (now being reprinted and marketed on the web) exposed the indeterminacy of empire in the maharajas' photographic self-fashionings and in the photographs' combinations of tactility with the spectral, surveillance with subversion, and high art with mass commercial circulation of these still-popular images.
ELAINE HADLEY, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: "War as Peace." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Michigan
Moderator: Melissa Valiska Gregory (English, U of Toledo)
W. L Burn famously characterized the "mid-Victorian generation" as an "age of equipoise," and to a large degree Victorian scholarship has apparently accepted this characterization, at least insofar as cultural history and, particularly, cultural studies of our own past generation has spent little ink in thinking about Victorian war—whether specific wars (the Crimean), the effect of wars, the definition of war, the cultural texture of war. Is this absence of commentary an indication of a relative absence of armed military conflict or of a particular Victorian understanding of war that tranquilizes the historical record for them and us? Has the welcome elaboration of Victorian studies into British imperial studies or global English studies revised or replaced this absence of war with a continual presence of conflict? Does or should the category matter? And, it seems imperative to consider: Is this question itself a response to the contemporary West's ambivalent embrace of a "war on terror," a rhetoric and policy that at times merges official state conflicts with acts of terrorism, uprisings, and riots, even while daily life seems untouched by a "war effort"? And while we can't even hope to address—let alone answer—these questions, I'd like to return briefly to the Age of Equipoise, to some journalistic accounts of mid-Victorian war, and see if we can't begin to explore this topic.
JOHN KUCICH, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY: "Why Study the Victorian Novel?" Workshop sponsored by the Ellen Brown Fund of the Dept. of English at Michigan State U
Moderator: Emily Allen (English, Purdue U)
Recent historicist approaches have dislodged the novel from its privileged place in the analysis of nineteenth-century British culture, and have rendered its status in our scholarship uncertain. We will begin considering the future of the novel in British studies by discussing Nancy Armstrong's contrarian How Novels Think (Columbia, 2006), which makes a case for the centrality of the novel to nineteenth-century political subjectivity. Using that discussion as a springboard, we will pursue a series of questions about the novel: how do we situate it as an index to British culture in our own work, in our undergraduate and graduate teaching, and in our hiring practices?
Reading Assignment: Nancy Armstrong's How Novels Think (Columbia, 2006)
CHRISTOPHER LANE, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY: "Victorian Social Phobia: Psychology, Ethics, and Fiction." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Iowa
Moderator: Stephen Arata (English, U of Virginia)
Victorian theories of fear and anxiety are, surprisingly, back in vogue among contemporary psychiatrists. Today, Maudsley and Kraepelin, not Freud, are figureheads for an amazing, often disturbing, set of claims about pathology, adaptation, and sociability. But even aside from the problem of using Victorian psychiatry to define our own "social phobia," Victorian fiction and philosophy often view this phenomenon very differently. This workshop examines just four alternative perspectives—Brontë's Villette and Eliot's Lifted Veil, with key works by Schopenhauer and Stirner—to assess the social, psychological, and ethical implications of withdrawal and anticommunitarianism in the nineteenth century and ours.
ANDREW MILLER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, INDIANA UNIVERSITY: "Critical Style and Questions of Distance." Workshop sponsored by the Dept. of English at the U of Iowa
Moderator: Jill Matus (English, U of Toronto)
This workshop will concern an issue of method, namely the distance between scholar and object of study, and the rhetorical devices which contribute to the creation of that distance—devices including as the metaphor of "distance" itself. Recently brought into focus by the historian Mark Salber Phillips, the issue was also of importance for Victorian writers, and so our own study of it will necessarily take a recursive turn as we study both recent critics and Victorian writers who profit from the manipulation of critical distance. Much of my attention, at least, will be on the stylistic or rhetorical manipulation of distance. We'll read essays by Phillips, as well as D.A. Miller and Stanley Cavell along others. As a Victorian point of reference, I would like us all to have a recent familiarity with Daniel Deronda.
This essay, which is part of a book on Romanticism and colonial natural history, seeks to provide a different way of looking at nature during this period. Instead of adopting the conventional view that nature is a stable, enduring phenomenon, it will argue that there were many natures at this time and that what was perhaps most characteristic about them, what made them as modern as the societies that emerged with them, is that they traveled. Instead of thinking about nature as being rooted in place, this essay will examine the globalized "routing" of new natures to new places. Its goal is to complicate our understanding of the physical world introduced by colonialism, one in which native biota struggled to live with plants and animals that had come from afar. The new natures of the Romantic period now included immigrant populations and cosmopolitan natures. If we are to understand why writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries talked so much about nature at this time, we need to consider in more concrete ways what was happening to the nature around them.
Paper still available to NAVSA members on our web site 
Other documents still available to NAVSA members on our web site