Guest Post: Kevin Hutchings (University of Northern British Columbia)
Greetings from the venerable city of York, where I have just finished attending my fourth academic conference in two and a half weeks! Since my first two conferences (the inaugural meeting of the Native Studies Research Network UK, which took place in the gorgeous city of Geneva, and the specially convened “Literary Geographies” Conference held on the lovely campus of Nottingham University) dealt with Romanticism only peripherally, I won’t discuss them in this forum.
As for the last two conferences I have attended—the joint BARS/NASSR meeting convened at the University of Bristol and the “William Blake at 250” conference held at the University of York—all I can say—with apologies to my revered colleagues who don’t study the work of William Blake—is that it has been a heck of a summer for Blake Studies.
Why do I say so? First of all, of the 88 panels listed in the 2007 BARS/NASSR conference programme, seven were wholly devoted to discussions of Blake (and this rough count does not include numerous other papers on Blake that were delivered at the conference on non-Blake themed panels).
Why was Blake more popular than any other single Romantic-era author at the BARS/NASSR conference? Perhaps it was because the conference theme—“Emancipation, Liberty, Freedom”—lent itself so nicely to discussions of a poet who famously criticized the willingness of his fellow Londoners to submit to the “mind-forg’d manacles” of late-eighteenth-century ideology. Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Blake not only wrote (in poems like “The Little Black Boy” and “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”) about slavery and the need for human emancipation, but because he had a tendency (whether good or bad) to deploy slavery as a metaphor to characterize oppressive social circumstances of all kinds. Whatever the answer might be, Blake stocks—if I may invoke such a crass mundane metaphor of “getting and spending”—seemed to be on the rise at the 2007 BARS/NASSR conference.
It is interesting to watch the stocks of Romantic writers rise and fall with the passing of time. A number of years ago at either a NASSR or a BARS conference (at the moment, due to conference fatigue, I can’t quite remember exactly which one or precisely when it took place) the same thing happened with Mary Shelley Studies. There were so many papers on Mary Shelley’s work—compared to almost none on the work of her erstwhile more famous husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley—that one of my colleagues declared:
“From now on, when someone mentions “Shelley,” we should assume that she or he is speaking of Mary, not Percy,” and he added, for good measure: “Henceforth, let Percy be called ‘the artist formerly known as Shelley!’”
Like the BARS/NASSR conference, the Blake conference in York, which concluded yesterday, was a wonderful event. Held to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth, it featured 19 panels (for a total of 59 papers) plus fine plenary sessions by such Blake All-Stars as Tracy Chevalier, Morris Eaves, Andrew Lincoln, Saree Makdisi, Jon Mee, and Michael Phillips. I would have a number of things to say about the conference’s ultimate passionate debate concerning the value of theoretical versus historical research in Blake Studies, but I’ve already spoken too long, it’s getting late, and I must be off to the pub or I’ll miss last call!
With best wishes from York,
Kevin.
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Kevin Hutchings is the author of Literature Compass article, ‘Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies‘, Literature Compass 4.1 (2007): 172-202, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00417.x
August 15, 2007 at 8:23 pm |
At BARS/NASSR 2007, there were, by my count, 8 Blake panels which with papers in other panels made a grand total of 27 Blake papers. Neither Wordsworth, nor Coleridge, nor the Shelleys even got into double figures. According to Mark Lussier (in Clark & Whittaker’s Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture) Blake had dropped off the academic map in recent years. He was certainly back this year–with papers mostly by younger scholars–and a strong contingent from Japan at both Bristol and York. Perhaps, from now on, when someone mentions “Romanticism,” we should assume that she or he is speaking of Blake.
Come on Kevin! Tell us what you made of the York “conference’s ultimate passionate debate concerning the value of theoretical versus historical research in Blake Studies”. You should be back from the pub now.
Cheers
Keri
August 29, 2007 at 9:40 pm |
As Keri Davies notes in his welcome response to my recent blog entry, it is indeed high time that I offered my comments on what I referred to as the conference’s “ultimate passionate debate concerning the value of theoretical versus historical research in Blake Studies.” (And no, Keri, I have not been at the pub ever since I posted that entry, despite any rumours you might have heard to the contrary!)
First some context: During the closing plenary panel at this summer’s Blake conference, Professor Michael Phillips asserted that modern scholarship has all too often impeded a proper understanding of Blake’s work by failing adequately to account for the historical and biographical details informing its production. What scholars must avoid, Phillips asserted, was the common tendency to bring our *own* questions, interests, and paradigms to bear upon Blake’s work, since, if we approach Blake Studies with our heads full of pre-given ideas, we will inevitably fall into anachronism. With little equivocation, Phillips argued that historical scholarship provides the only valid approach to Blake Studies, and that all other modes of criticism (presumably including thematic, hermeneutic, or theoretical approaches) are highly questionable if not implicitly irrelevant.
Far be it from me to criticize the importance of historical scholarship in Blake Studies. In my view, indeed, some of the field’s best and most exciting recent insights have come out of the historical approach—as (to name only a few examples) conference papers by Keri Davies and Craig Atwood (on the newly discovered Moravian connection) and Jared Richman (on the relationship between Blake’s poetics and his engraving practice) clearly demonstrated during the conference at York.
But to dismiss non-historical modes of scholarship out of hand seems problematic, if not philosophically anti-Blakean. Consider the case of “Milton,” wherein Blake himself derides the “daughters of memory” (his name for the muses of history) due to their association with past circumstances and established conventions. Blake had very little use for these particular muses and the time-worn modes of creative enterprise they tend to support; hence he speaks of the need to “To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration.”
But as a visionary poet and self-proclaimed prophet, Blake evinced a very different attitude toward the “daughters of inspiration,” those muses who look not to the past but to the present and the future, to the moment of creation and its potential artistic and social outcomes. Although Blake’s distinction between the muses of memory and those of history is not without problems of its own, it nevertheless suggests the need to rethink a mode of criticism that would emphasize historical scholarship to the exclusion of critical approaches that largely derive their inspiration from present-day critical, social, and philosophical concerns. Blake himself strove to change the world in the present and the future, not to dwell single-mindedly on questions of the past.
My second concern regarding Professor Phillips’s dismissal of non-historical modes of scholarship has to do with pedagogy and the continuing relevance of Blake studies in modern academia. On numerous occasions I have watched my undergraduate students (many of whom have a tendency to resist poetry altogether) develop an interest in Blake’s work because it speaks to issues that are important in their own lives: the need to question authority, to speak out against various forms of political tyranny, to celebrate sexual expression, to value alternative modes of knowledge and thought. For many of my students, in short, Blake remains relevant in the twenty-first century primarily because his work helps them to see and reflect more clearly upon aspects of their own lives. There can be no doubt that such a relationship to Blake courts anachronism, that it is all too easy for students and teachers to see themselves in Blake’s work and forget about the artist himself and the historical conditions under which he produced his art; but to enforce a strictly historical perspective in class discussions would, I fear, run the risk of turning Blake into a literary fossil—an irrelevant artifact of bygone history—and to foreclose the kinds of exuberant engagement that his work can inspire in the classroom at the very best of times.
To oppose historical and non-historical modes of scholarship in Blake Studies—to see these critical modes as somehow incompatible—goes against Blake’s own notion that “Without Contraries is no progression.” In my own recent scholarship, I strive to bring modern literary theory and historical study into productive dialogue. While modern theory often helps me to formulate the questions I *initially* bring to a literary text (thus providing me with a starting point for academic inquiry), I then try to discover whether the author had indeed asked similar or analogous questions and, if so, what the precise terms of these questions were. By bringing my current theoretical and critical concerns into dialogue with literary history in this way, my original questions are inevitably modified and reframed (if not discarded). Ideally, I try not to impose my own concerns upon the literary works that I study. It is only when my ideas and hypotheses are informed and transformed by my engagement with those works and their historical contexts that I begin to feel that I am on the right track. Such transformative moments are among the most exciting ones of my intellectual life.
Ultimately, despite the various good points that Professor Phillips made on the plenary panel, I remain convinced that historical scholarship and other modes of literary inquiry need not be rigidly opposed to one another in the realm of Blake Studies or elsewhere in literary scholarship. I was delighted, then, to see that Morris Eaves, Andrew Lincoln, and many other scholars asserted precisely this point during the debate that marked the end of this summer’s memorable and intellectually stimulating Blake conference. When put into dialogue with one another, history and hermeneutics (or history and theory, or history and politicized modes of criticism) can inspire exuberant and productive modes of mental fight that will keep Blake Studies relevant in the present without necessarily falling into mere anachronism. In my view, the conference’s passionate closing debate exemplified this potential, providing food for thought that will help to keep Blake Studies alive, healthy, and moving forward in the twenty-first century.