Literature Compass Pre-Kalamazoo Round-Up

Image: Kalamazoo, Michigan (Source: Wikipedia)

As Kalamazoo fast approaches, we’re delighted to provide a list of panels below which Literature Compass editors and board members will be involved with this year.

As usual, we hope to have some post-conference coverage of ‘Zoo so do keep an eye on the blog in the days following the conference!

List of Kalamazoo Panels with Literature Compass editors or editorial board members:

Thursday May 8, lunchtime

Session 47
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
The Political Arthur
Sponsor: Arthurian Literature
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: James P. Carley, York Univ.
Arthurus Rex, Alexander Imperator
Thomas Hahn, Univ. of Rochester
Who Would Write a Letter about Piers Gaveston in the Voice of Morgan le Fay?
Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College
Arthur and Empire in Early Tudor England: Leland’s Assertio . . . Arturij (1544) and Laboryouse Journey (1549)
Stewart Mottram, Univ. of Aberystwyth

PANEL REPORTS: (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, Bologna, March 12-15, 2008

Photo: Left>Right - Kelvin Everest, Carlo Bajetta, Stuart Curran and Paul Chirico.

We are very pleased to present the following panel reports from the recent (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, held in Bologna, March 12-15, 2008. Carlo Bajetta provides an overview of the double sesssion he organized on ‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’, while Diego Saglia  provides insight into the panel on ‘The Italian Plays of Mary Russell Mitford’. Isabella Imperiali then rounds things off with a detailed look at the panel on ‘Romantic Performances’. As usual, do feel free to use the comments feature below to provide feedback or pose questions!

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Panel Report - Carlo M. Bajetta (Università della Valle d’Aosta)

‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’

This double special session intended to explore an area which, curiously, seems to have been neglected by editorial theory. Computer technology has had an impact both on the presentation of literary texts and on the sales of traditional book forms. Consequently a large number non-native speakers of English (who may also have a limited knowledge of British history and culture), access electronic texts via their computer screens or purchase printed editions through on-line bookshops.

Modern editorial thinking related to Romantic texts has been crucial in establishing new principles for scholarly editing: it has prompted a new way of looking at, and reinterpreting, textual criticism. The question which the panel speakers had to answer was: can Romantic editors cope with such a significant change both in medium and potential audience?

[Carlo M. Bajetta’s Powerpoint presentation is available here]

Friday 14th March

Kelvin Everest’s paper (’Shelley’s Adonais: Keats as a Classic’) helped the audience to understand the nature of editing itself, both from a theoretical point of view and from a practical perspective. Everest considered two basic questions of definition. What is the mode of existence of a literary culture, and in particular how should we conceive such a culture when it is historically remote? This (double) question connects with the different problem of the mode of existence of a literary text, and the relevance to that question of editorial activity. Everest took as an example Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, Adonais, which itself addresses these questions. His brilliant examination of this text showed that the efficacy of an edition is linked to one’s ability to defend one’s procedures and that the material presentation of the literary past is, first and foremost, a matter of ethical choice.

Stuart Curran, who has just finished his tasks as general editor of the Pickering & Chatto 14-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith, focused on Smith’s extensive intertextual citation. Faced with the almost hypertextual nature of Smith’s texts, the editorial team decided to use internet resources extensively, but also to look at these resources with due caution and much critical consideration. To quote but an example, transcriptions such as those from Milton’s Paradise Lost included in some well-known (and expensive) on-line repertories turned out to rely on conventions which made text searches quite ineffective. This experience, as Curran explained in his talk (entitled ‘Charlotte Smith and Multiculturalism’), was very valuable; it suggested some radical

Towards a Restless Medieval Studies: Redux

[cross-posted at In The Middle]

Figure 1. The Nomadic Museum

[be sure to follow link above to a really intriguing ongoing art project, "Ashes and Snow," by the photographer Gregory Colbert, which involves a traveling, nomadic museum space as well as an online bestiary codex; it's a wonderful "moving" emblem for Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's idea of a restless medieval studies: see below for more on that]

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has shared over at the group medieval studies weblog In The Middle his comments for The BABEL Working Group’s Kalamazoo round-table discussion session, “What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?” [Sunday, May 11, 8:30 am], and in sympathy with his argument there, I want to share here a portion of an essay I wrote last fall, “Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies,” which is forthcoming in The Heroic Age any day now. The essay was partly written in response to a weblog debate last winter between myself, Michael Drout, Tirincula [pseudonym], and Richard Nokes over the supposed “state of the field” of Old English studies, but then it also morphed into a kind of argument I wanted to make for what Jeffrey Cohen has termed restless and mobile forms of scholarly “emplacement,” and for what I call in my essay, following Deleuze and Guattari, “schizoid” and nomadic processes of scholarly desire and scholarly desiring-machines. The entire essay is primarily pitched at certain vexed conversations and critical anxieties that seem to predominate in Old English/Anglo-Saxon studies, but I think the final part of the essay, which I share here, is applicable to medieval studies, and really, any scholarly studies, as a whole.

Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies

[what follows are excerpts from conclusion]

Perhaps the best answers to Michael Drout’s and Richard Nokes’s claims that some knowledge is never contingent or situated and that an important move for the self-preservation of Anglo-Saxon studies might be to at least privilege language study first before anything else (with the understanding that language study partakes in something like universal or pragmatic facts or truths), come from three graduate students in medieval studies, Liza Blake (New York University), Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University), and John Walter (Saint Louis University), two of whom (Blake and Walter) appended comments to my blog post, “My Life Among the Anglo-Saxonists.” Blake referenced Deleuze’s idea that, “when questioning something’s identity,” you should replace “intrinsic essences by active transformations. In this new system, [in the words of Manuel DeLanda, from Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy] ‘figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them’” (qtd. in Joy 2007). Of her own struggles to identify herself as a scholar, Blake wrote further,

If there’s anything I learned in undergrad[uate] and graduate school, as I slowly and awkwardly came to “identify” myself as a scholar of literature, it is that I’m not mastering an area by difference (I do _____ while philosophy does philosophy and linguistics does language), but mastering an ability to sense—and provide for—when a text needs more historical analyses and when it asks for philosophical analyses (insert various “icals” here). In short . . . I would identify myself not by what I do, buy by how the texts I read transform my scholarly work, and transform what it means for me to be (or become—I’ve got a long way to go yet) a scholar. (Qtd. in Joy 2007)

In another comment, Walter reminded us that “the problem with claims that all we need to do is focus on ‘x’ is that X gets its meaning from its relationships to everything that’s not X,” and he indicated that he “liked Walter Ong’s take on what English studies is,” as evidenced by an essay Ong wrote in 1971, “English 2000 A.D.,” where Ong ruminated:

I suspect that at its best English in the future will continue to develop by reaching out and pulling in around itself as many as possible of the other always burgeoning humanistic subjects (including the sciences in their manifold humanistic dimensions). . . . Perhaps the end result will be the emergence of a multidisciplinary field of study, which we can hope will not be invincibly chaotic and which we might be styled anthropology in the deepest sense of this term, with various foci, these for English being around the verbally produced artifact. (Ong 1971, 11)

Finally, in a memorial piece, “In Memoriam: Nicholas Howe,” written for In The Middle, Hurley ruminated on her experience of re-reading Howe’s book Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin, which Hurley believes teaches us “as much about being a medievalist as it does about being a traveler” (Hurley 2006). She explained the ways in which Howe’s book, although it is not ostensibly about Anglo-Saxon England, resonates with the themes that predominated Howe’s work with Old English texts: “the idea and construction of home, and the ways in which the loss of that home inscribes itself in a place, and moreover in writing” (Hurley 2006). And she also pointed out how Howe also directly invokes the ruins of Old English elegy—its enta geweorc [work of giants]—in relation to places such as an abandoned train station in Buffalo, New York or High Street in Columbus, Ohio. Most importantly, Hurley highlighted Howe’s insights in his book regarding the temporal paradoxes of pilgrimage and pilgrimage sites, which in my mind could stand as an apt description of the exemplary (and may I say, beautiful?) way in which Howe approached the study of the Anglo-Saxon world in his scholarship. As Howe himself put it,

[t]he return enacted by pilgrimage need not be—perhaps rarely is—within one’s own experience or life; it is more powerfully a return within commonly shared practices and memories. . . . A pilgrimage site endures in the life of a person paradoxically as a place of transience. You journey there, you are there, and then you leave. . . . But from that pilgrim’s place comes some understanding that it is not transient and fixes it in memory so it can be found again. (Howe 2003, 114)

British Association for American Studies Conference, University of Edinburgh, 27-30 March 2008

Image: ‘Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat’ (1826), engraving by William Miller after H W Williams (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Guest Post: Theresa Saxon (University of Central Lancashire)

The annual conference of the British Association for American Studies was this year hosted at the University of Edinburgh, rather fetchingly situated in the shade of Holyrood Park. There was no overarching theme for the conference, and papers had been invited on any subject relating to the United States of America and to early America across a wide range of disciplines, including history, literary studies, political science, cultural studies, film and media studies, and visual culture and art history, among others. Over 280 people attended the conference. This blog will presents an overview of sessions attended and hopefully, along the way, an account of the overall conference atmosphere.

Thursday’s initiating plenary lecture, delivered by Brenda Gayle Plummer, Professor in History at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Peace Was the Glue: Europe and African American Freedom,” offered a reading of the impact of transatlantic relations on the activism of African Americans. The lecture was followed by a reception at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, with speeches from Christopher Harvie (MSP) and First Minister of Scotland, the Right Honorable Alex Salmon, on prospects for Higher Education in Scotland. This first day of the conference was rounded off with a performance of American folk and bluegrass by Woody Guthrie Research Fellow Will Kaufman, amongst others. The impromptu backing singers were particularly good!

Demonstrating the diversity of panels, the first session I attended on Friday, the second day of the conference, discussed Contemporary American Comics. Paul Williams (University of Plymouth) delivered a paper on Jim Woodring’s Frank series and allegories of capitalism, focussing on Frank as both subscribing to and extending the range of the concept of the

Report II: (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, Bologna, March 12-15, 2008

Image: The Ecstasis of St. Cecilia, Raphael (1514) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Guest Post: Eric Gidal (University of Iowa)

It will be difficult for me to convey adequately the intellectual, culinary, cultural, and scenic delights provided to participants in this international conference. I might begin by noting the generous hospitality and mentioning the opening welcomes provided by officials of both the university and the city of Bologna, punctuated by the university choir Collegium Musicum Almae Matris; the guided tours of the Municipal Art Collection and the National Art Gallery of Bologna, the latter following the performative “Reading Raphael’s St. Cæcilia: Passages from Romantic Travellers”; the musical performances of the pianist Claudia D’Ippolito – who offered a program of Brahms, Liszt, and Chopin – and, in Bologna’s beautiful Museo della Musica, the trio of Giambattista Giocoili, Valentino Corvino, and Andrea Rebaudengo – who presented pieces by the Parisian “Group of Six,” musicians of the early twentieth century who followed the inspiration of Eric Satie; and a conference banquet to end all conference banquets to which I will return in concluding these remarks. The city of Bologna itself, of course, offered endless pleasures to those willing to stray from the conference’s full schedule and wander the miles of porticoed streets and surrounding Apennine foothills. The true pleasure of this conference for its many international visitors was surely the opportunity to tour both aesthetic and intellectual treasures with such ease.

The one-day pre-conference organized by CISR on the Italian Presence on the British Stage offered a wonderful introduction to the transnational themes and perspectives of the larger conference. Moving chronologically through a variety of forms from Shakespearean and Jacobean drama through Italian opera and Romantic pantomime, the Italian and British participants provided a strong survey of the mutually influential relationship between the two national traditions. Shakespeare was a recurrent point of reference. Ann Thompson (King’s College, London) presented a study of Charlotte Lenox’s reflections on Shakespeare’s Italy. Gaetano Falco and Alessandra Squeo (Università di Bari) offered a linguistic analysis of lexical migration between Italian and English in The Merchant of Venice. And Fernando Cioni (Università di Firenze) assessed Ernesto Rossi’s English performances of Hamlet. Vittoria Intonti (Università di Bari) reflected on the late-sixteenth century dramatic criticism of Giovanni Battista Guarini as pioneering an “audience based” conceptualization of genre in response to the tragicomedies of the Jacobean stage. Giuseppe Galigani (Università di Firenze) and Fabio Liberto (Università di Bologna) gave learned studies of the influence in Britain of Italian operas and the dramatic theories of Luigi Riccoboni respectively, while Nick Havely (University of York) and Jane Moody (University of York) offered fascinating accounts of the cultural influences of the Dante recitations of Gustavo Modena and the pantomimes of Joseph Grimaldi on the London stages of the early nineteenth century. The cumulative impression of these international and interdisciplinary presentations was of the fundamentally comparative motivations behind the

(Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, Bologna, March 12-15, 2008

Guest Post: Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Director, The Interdisciplinary Centre for Romantic Studies) and Diego Saglia (University of Parma)

If today’s world is one in which boundaries and identities are in constant flux, a crucial phase in the cultural and historical definition of this contemporary phenomenon was the Romantic period that was the specific area of investigation of the international conference “(Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities”, jointly organized by the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici (CISR) of the Università di Bologna and the North American Association for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). Over 250 Romanticists from all over the world met in Bologna from 12 to 15 March to discuss central Romantic-period issues such as identity-formation, the development of national cultures, the relevance of cosmopolitan and international ideas, the possibility of transnational aesthetics, and a wealth of intercultural exchanges and influences.

Bologna hosts the oldest University in Europe, and has been for centuries the core of cultural and ideological exchanges. The conference on trans-national identities is emblematic of Bologna’s status as a cultural and international centre. During the past few years the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici, directed by Lilla Maria Crisafulli, has had an important role in this process of internationalization of the University of Bologna, promoting a number of international conferences, and establishing partnerships with many international centers and universities. From 1993, the year in which the Centre was set up, it promoted extensive cultural activities aimed at investigating the culture of the Romantic period through an interdisciplinary outlook. This approach contributed to making the CISR a centre of excellence and a pole of attraction for scholars researching different literatures and disciplines.

The theme of the conference is contextualized within nineteenth-century culture, yet it sounds extremely contemporary. Migrations, cultural exchanges and conflicts, religious clashes, and globalization are all themes present and extremely relevant to our society and which we confront on a daily basis. Yet the times have changed: nowadays

Renaissance Society of America Conference, Chicago, 3-5 April 2008

Image: Anna Maria van Schurman, Self portrait (1632) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Guest Post: Julie Campbell (Eastern Illinois University)

This year’s RSA gathering at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago was a terrific success from my perspective. When the main complaint in circulation is that there are so many excellent sessions booked concurrently that it is impossible to hear all the papers that one wishes, it would seem that an exciting critical mass of current scholarship has been reached.

I was involved with a group of three panels, all of which were scheduled on Saturday, so I arrived in Chicago on Friday and spent Saturday with the cohort of scholars participating in Diana Robin and Carol Pal’s sessions on Rethinking Early Modern Publication. Session I was “Circles and Circulation in Early Modern Italy and England,” moderated by Elissa Weaver; Session II was “Gender and Manuscript Publication in Late Renaissance Europe,” moderated by Letizia Panizza; and Session III was “The Idea of the ‘Author’ in Early Modern Europe, moderated by Ann Blair. Collectively, these sessions addressed questions regarding authorship, print practices, and manuscript circulation that scholars including Roger Chartier, Margaret Ezell, Arthur Marotti, and numerous others have posed, providing a fascinating set of exempla which inspired much discussion.

Regarding “Circles and Circulation,” Marcy North explored the fashionable world of manuscript verse in Stuart England, discussing the characteristics of the most highly fashionable poems and considering especially the intriguing clusters of poems that traveled together as they were passed from collector to collector. Lynn Westwater’s commentary on the effects of print publication upon the career and reputation of Sara Copio Sullam, a Venetian Jewish writer, sparked a spirited inquiry into Sullam’s choices and the amount of control she had over her own work. Concerning “Gender and Manuscript Publication,” Anne Larsen provided a portrait of Anna Maria van Schurman’s interactions with presses, proving that Schurman’s move from manuscript circulation of her work to print publication was characterized by a fascinating combination of ambivalence on her part and coercion from her sponsors. Sarah Ross discussed the

Literature Compass 2007 Graduate Essay Prize - Shakespeare

We’re pleased to be able to finally announce that the winner of the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Shakespeare section, is:

‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Post-Reformation Desire’
by Patricia Marchesi (University of Colorado, Boulder)

The final results are listed below (also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in Literature Compass over the next few weeks, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.

In addition, the Renaissance prize is sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies – the winner also receives a cheque for $200/£100 and will have their essay published in the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Winners

Troubled Conversions: the Difference Gender Makes in The Sultan of Babylon
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Indiana University (Medieval Prize)

English Renaissance Drama: The Imprints of Performance
Gavin Paul, University of British Columbia (Renaissance Prize)

Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Post-Reformation Desire
Patricia Marchesi, University of Colorado, Boulder (Shakespeare Prize)

The Willa Cather Archive

Guest Post: Andrew Jewell, Editor, Willa Cather Archive

When I write or speak broadly about the Willa Cather Archive (http://cather.unl.edu), I gravitate to a couple of key terms to describe this scholarly resource, terms that, paired together, form a sort of paradoxical vision for the site: “useful” and “experimental.” These two words form a crude shorthand for both the underlying theory behind this specific resource dedicated to the life and writings of Willa Cather and for my broader ideal of work in the emerging field of digital humanities.

I’ve grown so comfortable with both “useful” and “experimental” that it hardly seems these two concepts need to be further explained, but perhaps locating them specifically in my work with the Willa Cather Archive will shed light on my particular use of the words:

Useful: As a young scholar in his first tenure-track appointment, I knew that I would risk undue obscurity in my particular scholarly community if I fixated on esoteric approaches, particularly when what I was embarking on was a new approach in a new medium. By being, at least partially, a “digital” humanist, I knew that I would appear to some to be the computer guy who might help them when they were having trouble with Microsoft Word, but who otherwise did work of little consequence. In order to counter that notion, I sought to produce and publish scholarly resources and tools that were otherwise missing from the community. For Willa Cather studies, that meant access to texts that were unaccessible, texts of key importance that were under-represented in the existing scholarship due largely to the sheer difficulty of getting a hold of them and reading them. Due to copyright restrictions, we can not put online anything written after 1922, but, thankfully, the large gaps in the textual record were from the early days of Cather’s career. We embarked on a few major projects that, though still incomplete, have brought many new resources easily into the hands of scholars everywhere:

1. The Willa Cather Journalism project: Co-directed by Kari Ronning, an Assistant Editor with the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, and myself, this project is an effort to

The Shakespeare Association of America conference, Dallas, March 13-15, 2008

Image: John W. Waterhouse, Miranda - The Tempest (1916) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Guest Post: Alan Galey (University of Alberta)

This year’s SAA conference was a standout in my experience, which so far includes most of the SAA meetings since 2002. Aside from offering an escape from the lingering winter in my home city of Edmonton (on roughly the same latitude as Moscow) for the warm hospitality of Texas, the conference had one of the strongest programs in years .

The SAA seminar format

More about program highlights below — first let me explain how the SAA format works, since it’s not just the typical collection of three-paper panels. The great majority of those presenting papers do so in pre-arranged seminars whose participants spend several months ahead of the conference sharing and giving feedback on research. Here’s a quick run-through for those who’ve never experienced the seminar format. In summer or early fall of each year the SAA Bulletin lists topics and blurbs for about 35 seminars or workshops. For example, this year I co-led, with Travis DeCook (Carleton U), a seminar on “Shakespearean Scripture: Biblical Contexts for Reception and Transmission,” and the year before I was a participant in Lukas Erne’s and Patrick Cheney’s excellent seminar on “Textual Cultures”. Leaders try to propose seminars that provoke thinking on a topic that matters — not necessarily Shakespeare-centered — but also to provide space for the full spectrum of critical approaches. Participants send in their top four seminar/workshop choices, learn of the result by email, then send an abstract to the rest of the group describing the paper they’ll write. As the conference itself draws closer, participants send their complete papers to each other (usually 12-15 pages), then write and receive comments on papers (often one writes two 1-page responses to designated papers, and receives two responses to one’s one paper).

So, by the time the seminar participants gather for

The Carlyle Letters Online

Guest Post: Brent E. Kinser (Western Carolina University), Coordinating Editor, The Carlyle Letters Online 

First, I appreciate the opportunity to post this introduction to The Carlyle Letters Online (http://carlyleletters.org) for Wiley-Blackwell’s Literature Compass Blog.

Without spending too much time reiterating the history of the project, which is readily available at http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/misc/onlineproject.dtl, I will briefly introduce the CLO and then write a few words about my experience as the coordinating editor.

The CLO as it exists now is comprised of the first 32 volumes of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, which has been published by Duke University Press since 1970. Conceptualized before WWII and begun in earnest in the 1950s, the project has laid many editors to rest. I myself have been working on the print and the electronic editions since 2001. Both projects continue to be rewarding in different ways, and they both continue to demand a significant portion of my scholarly life.

From the beginning, when the project was still known as “eCarlyle,” the issues we had to deal with were not that different from those that textual editors have always confronted. To the age-old questions of consistency, accuracy, transmission, and archive were added the issue of

On “Postcolonialism and the Hit of the Real,” 6-8 March 2008, NYU

Tuesday, 4 March, 4pm. I stand in a colleague’s office at MIT and tell her how I plan to get to the conference: “I’ll take the Chinatown bus. It’s so cheap! And it’ll be fun. And I figure it’s appropriate, since the conference is about ‘the real’ – eg. the less than pristine, the slightly worn, dirty, smelly, unsanitary, or what have you.” She applauds my sense of adventure before passing along this gnomic warning against the rest stops along the way: “Nothing In, Nothing Out.”

Thursday, 6 March, 5.30pm. Robert JC Young opens the conference by wondering what validity can be found now in one of the founding causes of postcolonial study: to represent once (or still) colonized peoples’ real experiences, otherwise distorted by the processes of knowledge production and meaning making unearthed by Edward Said et al. Listening to this, I am troubled. Are those experiences any less real because I haven’t encountered them in representation? Indeed, is it my very encounter with them that makes them no longer real?

We’re on safer ground when he turns to the continued relevance of the postcolonial project: inequities exist; some argue they are more extreme now than ever; and, I’d add, they continue to structure what we understand when we call something “the real.” Tackling them should be our task, whether we want to call ourselves postcolonialists or not. Agreed. But then where would we imagine “the real” to be?

Thursday, 6 March, 6pm. In the keynote that opens the conference Simon Gikandi asks if somewhere along the way realism became an integrally postcolonial form. He rejects the logic that imagines a monolithic European metropolitan non-mimetic modernism and then positions the postcolonial as a realist challenge to all that. After all, by focusing on the inner workings of the minds of her characters, characters whose perceptions often seem to constitute a world by no means separate from their ways of seeing, wasn’t Virginia Woolf interested in a truer representation of what she took reality to be? And isn’t the magic realism that proliferates within postcolonial writing meant to access something neglected by empiricist faith in the transparency of language and the straightforward availability of reality to representation? And while writers like Chinua Achebe and VS Naipaul might have disavowed modernism at various points in their careers, the act of disavowal is still a form of relation. Moreover, as Gikandi says, many writers also actively turned against the notion that their task would be to present for the edification of their (often metropolitan) audiences some fetishized reality missing from works that “originated” in the colonizers’ milieus.

With all of this in mind, Gikandi’s suggestions about how to think about realism strike me as especially welcome. Against the classic definition, which identifies

Literature Compass MLA Panel - Video Now Online!

We’re extremely pleased to announce that the Literature Compass MLA Panel, ‘Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies’, is now available to watch online!

The videos are embedded in this post below, and you can also watch them via our Compass Journals channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/CompassJournals.  

The panel was organised and chaired by our Eighteenth Century Section Editor, Cynthia Wall and included our Editor-in-Chief Peter Brown on the panel.

The full line-up of videos is as follows:

1. Cynthia Wall, Univ. of Virginia, Introduction
2. Peter Brown, Univ. of Kent
3. Christine Ruotolo, Univ. of Virginia Librarian
4. Kathryn J. Lowerre, Michigan State
5. Gail Aw, Univ. of Virginia
6. David Radcliffe, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.
Part 1  Part 2
7. David A. Golumbia, Univ. of Virginia
8. Q&A  Part 1 Part 2   

We’d like to extend our thanks to Cynthia Wall for leading the panel, and to all the speakers for their engaged and engaging contributions.

One of the aims in making this panel available online is to allow the discussion to continue and have an ‘afterlife’ following the conference. So do feel free to post your comments on this panel and the issues raised using the comments feature below.

Friday, 28 December
159. Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies
8:30–9:45 a.m., Atlanta, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Cynthia Wall, Univ. of Virginia, Introduction:

More videos after the fold -

Between What Is Ours and What Is Not Ours: Cary Howie’s Claustrophilia, Anachronism, Friendship, and an Open Letter to My Profession

[cross-posted to In The Middle]

“Salient point is an early and sadly obsolete term for the heart as it first appears in the embryo: I fell upon it in a book of classical obstetrics with a sense of celebration. The heart, I believe, is that point where we merge with the universe. It is salient as a jet of water is salient, leaping continually upward, and salient as an angle is salient, its vertex projecting into this world, its limbs fanning out behind the frame of another. What I love of Caroline is that space of her at rest behind the heart, true and immanent, hidden and vast, the arc that this angle subtends. I would like to cobble such few sentences into a tower, placing them in the world, so that I might absorb what I can of these things in a glance. But when we say I love you, we say it not to shape the world. We say it because there’s a wind singing through us that knows it to be true, and because even when we speak them without shrewdness or understanding, it is good, we know, to say these things.” –Kevin Brockmeier, “These Hands,” Things That Fall from the Sky: Stories

“Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines [s]he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.”—Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” [interview], Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

“Nothing, it would seem, is more difficult than to conceive, to elaborate, and to put into practice ‘new relational modes’.”—Leo Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality”

When I and Myra Seaman were writing our Introduction to Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages [“Through a Glass, Darkly: Medieval Cultural Studies at the End of History”], we knew that we had to define, in some detail, what we meant by an engaged “cultural studies” and, related to that, what we thought we meant when we invoked the “political”—more specifically, in what ways can we really describe a certain kind of literary and cultural studies as “political”? I myself am so keenly aware of all the shallow and ultimately empty ways in which certain cultural studies are described as “political,” that I was almost frightened to make any such claim, and at one point I felt almost frozen in my inability to articulate how it could be that a book such as ours, which gathers together essays by medievalists on subjects as disparate as reality television, Chaucer, and White House legal memos, was really “political.” I found one possible route out of this impasse through thinking about how the work of the intellectual who engages with troubling contemporary subjects [such as torture or terrorism or the loss of the autonomous self and moral community] is simply necessary in and of itself [as work that can’t not be done, if one is compelled or called to do it, if one is paying any attention to the world], or perhaps, as a kind of ethical responsibility, regardless of any immediately detectable material and efficacious outcomes of that work. It may be that you don’t believe that scholarly writing actually changes anything real, but that does not let you off the hook of the attempt to intervene, however you can, into social and political orders and their cultural phenomenon. Or, as we put it in our Introduction, “As medievalists who are, whether we like it or not, the inheritors of a humanist tradition, we bear a special responsibility to the idea that the life devoted to reading, reflection, and letters retains some power in the matter of how history ‘turns out’.” Can we really engage in studies in which we claim we can’t or don’t care about the relation between our studies and the world? Or, as Paul Strohm once put it, and much more eloquently,

Postmodernism has been devastating in its critique of the authoritative observer, exposing feigned objectivity as a construction founded in privilege and supported by social authority. But its seeming obverse—complete disinvestment—is actually its twin, founded in a similar claim of disinterest and no less privileged (in this case, in its enjoyment of the privilege not to care). I associate unpositionality with privilege because history (past and present) is full of people placed in circumstances that require care, full of people who can’t not care. Such historical actors can neither be everywhere nor be nowhere; they have no choice but to be somewhere. And this is where I suggest we position ourselves: provisionally, precariously, temporarily, maybe sometimes bemusedly—but always somewhere. And wherever that somewhere is, that it be an invested place, a place that knows things are at stake. [Theory and the Premodern Text, p. 161]

Introducing The Victorian Dictionary

Image: Punch, 6th September, 1890
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Guest Post: Lee Jackson

I’m hoping that some of you will have already stumbled across The Victorian Dictionary (aka The Dictionary of Victorian London, aka www.victorianlondon.org) but I’m always looking for more readers, so it was great to hear from Literature Compass that they’d like me to introduce the site to a wider audience.

What is The Victorian Dictionary, you may ask? And who is this guy anyway?

Well, let’s start with the first question. Essentially, it’s an online repository for 19th century texts that illuminate the social history of Victorian London, and Victorian life in general. You can browse the various pages (there are about five thousand now, I think) by category and sub-category, and a page can contain anything from a brief quote from a newspaper article, to several chapters from various 19th C. books.

If you want a really short answer, it’s an online anthology of Victorian London life.

What’s special about the site, I like to think, is the sheer variety of the material available, combined with the specific focus on London. So, for instance, if you want to find half a dozen contemporary accounts of London music halls, see Entertainment – Theatre and Shows – Music Hall; if you’re interested in reading about hanging, see Prisons – Executions and Punishments; if it’s drains you fancy, then Health and Hygiene – Sewers and Sanitation. The list isn’t endless, but if you browse through, you’ll find it’s quite substantial. You can also search by keywords, like a Google search, and there’s a Bibliography. There’s no commentary; no attempt to be ‘comprehensive’; but it’s chock full of primary sources. The texts themselves range from London reportage and ‘social investigation’ (from the likes of George Sala, Henry Mayhew, James Greenwood, and more obscure authors) to extracts from diaries, guidebooks, etiquette manuals, maps, official reports, topography, penny dreadfuls, journal articles &c. There’s also a range of cartoons (from Punch, Cruikshank and others), a limited number of photographs, and a few ‘added features’, such as a Dickens-specific search engine, a random-page button, a slang dictionary, plus links to other more obscure Victorian sites … well, discover them for yourself!

The site came about because, as a historical novelist, I just couldn’t keep track of what I was reading about the city. It’s really an ‘electronic brain’ so I don’t have

The Physiology of the Novel / Marriage and Violence

        

We’re delighted to note that Nicholas Dames, Literature Compass Victorian Section Editor, and Frances Dolan, Literature Compass Editorial Board member, have each recently had new books published!

Nicholas Dames’ new book is entitled The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction: 

How did the novel audience of the nineteenth century read? Answering that deceptively simple question is the purpose of The Physiology of the Novel. By revealing a now-forgotten range of Victorian theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, Nicholas Dames demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine— as a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections— from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century—The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture’s way of reading, responding, and feeling.

Frances Dolan’s Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy is described thus:

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? In Marriage and Violence, Frances E. Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage so flawed, she contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.

Dolan ranges from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature to late twentieth-century discussions about how to defend battered women who kill their abusers; from the inevitable Taming of the Shrew to William Byrd’s diary of life on his Virginia plantation and Noel Coward’s Private Lives. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious persons assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.

Do feel free to add your reviews / thoughts on these new books via the comments feature below!

Some reflections on the cell phone convention: the 123rd MLA Convention, Chicago, Dec 27-30, 2007

Guest Post: John M. Hill (United States Naval Academy)

I have not attended MLA conventions in the recent past, other than to give a paper and leave, or else spend time in a hotel room helping interview job candidates for my English Language and Literature Department (U.S. Naval Academy). This past December my time was largely unencumbered, such that I could attend sessions, especially those offered within the auspices of the Old English Division, on whose Executive Committee I sit.

Our three sessions featured topics one might group under material or at least social and political culture. In the open session Tom Hill (Cornell University) presented an overview of King Alfred’s likely ideological interests in putting together the preface to and the body of the West Saxon Law Codes. He noted that Alfred probably read the Bible as a king would, a point that has wide bearing when one considers such a king’s view of power, polity and wisdom. The Saturday session on speaking objects and texts, wherein I presided, offered interesting insights into lament and burials (Mary K. Ramsey, Fordam University), the fierce role of marginal women, such as Hildegyð in “Waldere” ( Ann Lanpher, University of Toronto) and the Lacanian psychology of speaking wood in “The Dream of the Rood” (Erin Labbie, Bowling Green). Now here is a good moment for explaining my lead note: not only were cell phones, a variety of handheld devices and laptops nearly everywhere, the desire to speak into and through one was overpowering, especially at the end of sessions where, on the whole, one sat quietly if not under duress. As for phones and laptops, they became the perfect, albeit transparent, isolation chamber. Anyone manipulating both at once clearly was not to be disturbed, the entire show perhaps warding off the possible embarrassment of being ignored or otherwise having to deal with one’s insignificance amidst thousands of hustling and even bustling academics.

The Division’s third session, after a lively account of references to monuments in Old English texts (Robin Waugh, Wilfred Laurier University) culminated with papers showing what a term such as ‘heofonbeacen’ in “Exodus” might have pictured to an Anglo-Saxon eye: just what sort of ship, sail or rigging might have been involved (Miranda Wilcox, University of Notre Dame)? An account of erotically amusing riddles tied lines down to the craft of spinning, nicely material and no doubt germane. The referents of suggestive words and phrases are not quite as unknowable as

2007 MLA Convention – Digital Perspectives

Photo: ‘Cloud Gate‘ sculpture, more popularly known as ‘The Bean’, in Millennium Park, Chicago.
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The MLA this year as usual provided many opportunities to meet, discuss with, listen to and be challenged by the scholarly community and the rich variety of work in progress. With Literature Compass in mind, I was particularly interested to attend some of the many panels on varying aspects of digital humanities – I managed to get to a few which I describe below, but I hope that blog readers may be able to fill myself and the wider community in on any other related panels of note which I missed. This behemoth of a conference of course always means making difficult choices between events!

As well as our annual Literature Compass Editorial Board meeting, which threw up many interesting ideas for the year ahead, the MLA also saw our first ever sponsorship of an MLA Panel. Organised and chaired by our 18th Century Section Editor, Cynthia Wall, and including our Editor-in-Chief Peter Brown, the panel managed to attract a lively and engaged audience despite its early Friday timeslot.

Entitled ‘Got ECCO? The Contents and Discontents of Electronic Media for Early Modern Studies’, the panelists also included

Christine Ruotolo (Univ. of Virginia Librarian)
Kathryn J. Lowerre (Michigan State Univ.)
Gail Aw (Univ. of Virginia)
David Radcliffe (Virginia Tech)
David A. Golumbia (Univ. of Virginia)

The panel covered many issues related to digital humanities and there was an interesting Q&A afterwards. We were able to add an extra dimension by having the event videotaped. We’ll be making the panel freely available online very shortly for the benefit of all of those of you unable to attend the MLA or this particular panel – this will hopefully create an ‘afterlife’ for the panel and allow you to contribute to the discussion which was started there.

One of the most frustrating things with conference panels is that, at the end,

Literature Compass 2007 Graduate Essay Prize - Results

Many thanks to all those of you who entered the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize – and also for your patience during the judging process this year which was very tight in many sections.

The final results are listed below (and are also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in Literature Compass, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.

In addition, the Renaissance prize is sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies – the winner also receives a cheque for $200/£100 and will have their essay published in the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Winners

Troubled Conversions: the Difference Gender Makes in The Sultan of Babylon
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Indiana University (Medieval Prize)

The 2007 Murfreesboro Conference & Miltonic Magnificence

L to R: Plenary speaker Laura Knoppers; conference organizers (and master and mistress of ceremonies) Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt; plenary speaker Richard J. DuRocher (without flash-cards), co-director Kevin J. Donovan, and conference advisor John T. Shawcross.

Guest Post: Carol Barton (Independent Scholar)

The biennial Conference on John Milton at Murfreesboro sponsored by the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University may be the only one of its kind—not because its focus is John Milton, but because its signature characteristic is the high conviviality of its atmosphere and the perennial absence of rancor among its participants—even when they agree to disagree. Its founders and masters and mistress of ceremonies, Professors Charley Durham, Kris Pruitt, and Kevin Donovan have a great deal to do with that, and perhaps that is why the conference has so many habitual attendees. Graduate students are indistinguishable from distinguished scholars both in terms of the warmth of their reception and the enthusiasm and grace with which their ideas are heard and evaluated by their peers. Retirees and independent scholars are as well-represented as those who have been subsidized by their institutions for making the trip, and that in itself speaks volumes about the quality of the event. There is no job fair; there are no interviews. But they build it, and again and again, we come.

As a member of the former group, it is perhaps fitting that I have been asked by Wiley-Blackwell to present the first blog on what many people refer to simply as “the Murfreesboro conference,” covering the convention of October 2007: I’m academically beholden to no one, and therefore have no reason to paint the picture any rosier than I see it. But by the same token, the fact that I have made it my business to attend every second year (all but once “on my own nickel”) and have never regretted doing so should forewarn you that my bias is a positive one. I like being there, as do most of the repeat attendees.

Because this column is also the first of its kind, however, I’d like to present a little historical background with which even some of the more seasoned veterans