The Scriblerus Memoirs

Decisions, Decisions

2010-05-31T09:38:00.016-04:00

Lev Grossman's recent article in Time on the form and function of recommendation engines draws distressingly close to the coda of my recently finished dissertation, and there's no doubt he's remembered his years as a Comp Lit PhD student at Yale. In an earlier post, I wrote on some of the connections between Milton's Raphael and Google's PageRank algorithm as superhuman mediators of what we would call information overload, and some of that found its way into my conclusion. Grossman's article begins and ends with nods in the direction of the eighteenth century, and the issue at stake is the same: how to select what's worth paying attention to when faced with overwhelming volume.

The question Grossman asks of recommendation engines--the software responsible for matching what you've watched, heard, bought, etc. against other things you might like to watch, hear, buy, etc. and letting you know it's available--in his openers is "can a computer really have good taste?" The matters of taste and discernment of course ring rather a large bell in the addled brain of your average eighteenth-century scholar given what several authors of the time (especially Pope and Swift) perceived as a "deluge" of impolite or otherwise pointless writing the rising tide of which threatened to sink all boats and swamp the nation. If in Paradise Lost humanity emerged from the garden dependent on their powers of discernment to know good from evil, then under the Augustan conservatorship of taste and judgment discernment became the critical faculty by which the fragments of knowledge worth keeping would be separated from those better left to what Harold Weber has described as the "'garbage heap' of memory." Plenty of other authors and editors got into this act as well; indeed, whole genres emerged to do the work of selection so the poor reader wouldn't have to. Magazines like The History of the Works of the Learned and The Present State of the Republick of Letters, for example, accounted for what they defined as the most notable or most valuable works from Britain and beyond and left the rest to descend into oblivion.

In writing of the Digital Deluge, Grossman returns to an old analogy. Online retail provides us with a lot of choice--so much choice, he says, that "we're drowning in it." The recommendation engines (like the search engines of Google, Bing, what have you, that reduce the immensity of the web to ranked lists of returns) serve as what he calls an "informational prosthesis" that winnows the potentially paralyzing embarrassment of riches down to something manageable. Whereas Pope, however, would have had you (and everyone else, I think) rely on his good taste to set out something of a curriculum, the recommendation engine relies on your taste and that of your peers to point you towards something you're likely to like. If I were feeling particularly pedantic or just outright snooty I'd try to make an argument about taste versus preference, but it wouldn't get me anywhere. Fashion, if I can dive into the late 19th century for a moment, is what one wears oneself, and you already know the rest.

Grossman ends on a note lamenting the technodetermined perpetuation of existing preferences as opposed to the more locally driven processes of truly personal recommendation and serendipitous discovery (that old chestnut) that have the power to expand rather than reify the boundaries of one's "taste." And for reasons not so far passing understanding as they seem, he notes that, among other things, recommendation engines "won't force you to read the 18th century canon."

Damn right, I say--that's my job. Like plenty of authors, poets, and critics before me, I too am an "informational prosthesis" designed to function (at least in part) as a mediator of and remedy for information overload. If you liked Pamela, you'll like Tristram Shandy. You're bloody well going to read it, at any rate.

Crisis on Infinite Campuses

2010-04-25T13:23:00.016-04:00

Clearly my blogging impulses have waned these last two years. Perhaps as the project upon which I've been working has developed, my willingness to share it has diminished; once I decided it was worth protecting, I decided to protect it. Protect it from what, you ask? That's where the silly comes in. Rather than share early and often as part of a network of knowledge-producers, I elected to narrow the channels of communication and save my scholarship for what perhaps are too often held out as the ultimate end-products of academic endeavor. Articles and monographs still make the man, or so I've been led to believe, and while what I post here probably has the cross-section of a mosquito on the radar screen of academia, I'm still reticent to tip my hand and put other, faster, smarter, better writers onto what I hope will one day make my name. This strikes me as a shame and counter to my own inclinations; I know I'm not alone in this, and I likewise know there are those who are actually exploring new avenues and other options.

But, it seems, they do so somewhat at their peril, and perhaps it's having spent the last year (two years? five?) being churned through the machine that's left me simultaneously too frustrated to risk speaking my mind and too institutionalized to risk publishing my work five or ten kilobytes at a time or in other unconventional ways.

Or perhaps I'm just be tired of logging in to reject comments from bots, phishers, scammers, and all the other bottom-feeders of the illicit pharmaceuticals industry.

At the moment, then, I'm posting not to offer anything in the way of 18th-century interest but rather to process some emotions recollected in an unexpected because increasingly infrequent moment of tranquility.

At a recent gathering of some seriously profound thinkers representing multiple periods, disciplines, and professions, I was privy to some equally profound discussions about the future not only of literary study but of the humanities in general and the university system at large. The news, as you'd expect, is not good. The word "crisis" came up severally, and while some attempted to attach it to a sense of opportunity, I was left to confront my professional mortality without yet having been dipped by my heel in the waters of tenure. So--while we (there's only a limited kind of "we," really; within it there is an inescapable if potentially shifting "us, them, you, they" hierarchical structure based around seniority, experience, tenure, methodology, even technological know-how) have a shot at seizing the day and reshaping our brand of intellectual endeavor into something new and newly sustainable, a lot of the energy that might be put towards that goal can't be converted from potential to kinetic. Or at least, not easily.

During the course of the proceedings, a conversation came up regarding modes of publication (traditional presses, Open Book, et al.) and what present faculty would tell their graduate students about which roads to take. The question was then put to the three graduate students in the room, and I spoke rather strongly--perhaps even insensitively--as to my intentions. If given a choice been a prestigious UP or a non-traditional venue, I'd opt for the former. I should very much like to explore other options, but I don't want to risk being the Betamax (or Laserdisc, or HD-DVD, or what have you) of my scholarly generation. Not a perfect analogy, of course, but a genuine concern. One takes risks in being an early adopter of a technology that isn't currently and then doesn't become the industry standard.

As I spoke, I noticed several of the Powers present nodding their heads in vigorous agreement, as if the issue was an absolute no-brainer. Minutes later, I was encouraged by someone else not to "chicken out" of non-standard publication. The phrasing was, I genuinely think, meant to be encouraging, but it does suggest the extent to which even devotees recognize that the move requires some measure of intestinal fortitude, and while their successes demonstrate the "high risk, high reward" payoff mentioned by yet another person there, I rather think it's asking too much of people who are essentially burning off their twenties (and I daresay in some cases a good portion of their thirties) in graduate school to put their forties on the line by trying to time the market. If anything about the event cheesed me off, it was hearing from both the Digital Humanities people whose positions didn't preexist them and from the Tenured Proponents of Radical Difference delegation that the people with the least job security and the worst job prospects (graduate students) should be the drivers of change. How do you push without leverage?

Of course, we'd like to be agents of change--or at least, I'd like to, and I have a project in mind that's more in the line of database creation. There's a research question I have that can't be answered without a new tool, so I (along with, I hope, a group of like-minded individuals some of which, unlike me, actually know what they're doing) will have to build the tool. But, as I clucked at the time, first things first. No one's not going to give me tenure because I have a monograph. What, though, is the acceptance rate in the humanities departments around the country--you know, the two or three that are hiring--for people who show up with only non-traditional dissertative projects in motion and no book in sight? Sure, I thought, YOU'D hire or tenure that person, and by gum so would I, but without wholesale, system-wide institutional change, potentially excluding yourself from eight of the ten places hiring approaches either heroism or martyrdom. I'm all for heroes, of course, and certainly I sometimes find my brand of sniveling pragmatism a little cringe-worthy, but I have to believe I can find a via media between the Charybdis of radical innovation and the Scylla of academic conservatism. If I'm lucky enough to get a book published (massive, gargantuan if), I might then find myself better positioned to advocate for change. At any rate, I haven't got much of a choice in the matter if the department I join has made publish-or-perish the law of the land. And none of us has much of a choice in the matter of which departments we join.

Which brings me to another instance of what I lacked the temerity to say in the room. It's by way of recommendation, and rather more in the line of put up or shut up than was strictly appropriate for someone of my station to offer to his betters. If you are a tenured faculty member who strongly believes that the current model and modes of scholarly production and distribution are approaching or have arrived at obsolescence, that there's an emergent need to alter (or creatively destroy) our disciplinary course, that, in short, there really is a crisis on infinite campuses, I expect your most recent traditionally produced and published monograph to have been your last. Your next conference presentation will reject the premise of the academic conference; your next article (if there is another article) will not appear in a traditional journal. If you stop reifying the generic conventions of academic output, then it'll be much easier for the movement to pick up speed. One of you engaging in a new kind of collaborative work, blogging your research, or tweeting your way through a conference does more to change old genres and elevate new ones than ten of me doing the same. Well, fifty of me. Ten of someone five times better than me. This is what tenure is for. At my end of the clock, one of the speakers very poignantly argued, the system tends to produce conservative output--not only in its form but in its content. People on the other side of that perhaps too-Holy Line of Demarcation can change the system from within. You simply cannot tell your vulnerable advisees to damn the torpedoes while you continue to work on the Next Big Thing to come out of Chicago or Cambridge. Unless, of course, Chicago and Cambridge are going to change the way they do things too.

That's what I should have said. At the time, though, it seemed clear that nobody in the room had much to offer by way of a plan, and somehow the question that resulted in the above tirade -- what would you tell your graduate students to do -- managed to go unanswered by anyone but a graduate student who had already made up his mind.

We all want to believe in what we do. We have to believe that some kind of new order will emerge out of what is impossible to see as anything but chaos. I think we agree that we can't go on like this; I know we don't agree on what to do next. If you have graduate students, what are you telling them to do?

By Force or Guile

2009-09-29T21:18:00.010-04:00

We'll move right past the amount of time it's been since I last posted as it will only recall to me how much time has gone by since I've done anything the least bit substantive.

This won't be substantive either, as it's a call for help. I expect that once the semester's Job Market michigas has ended, I will have plenty of time to pursue this line of inquiry myself (time that would be better spent preparing to go on the the Job Market again the following year, though we'll jump off that bridge when we come to it), but I'm feeling twitchy and frustrated so I thought I would do as many have done before me and turn to the internet to solve all of my problems.

I'm sure there's an easy way I could do this myself, but I'm too flustered to find it, and I want answers, so I'm asking you. I might soon put the question to the C-18L list as well, but for the moment I lack the nerve, and it's not really an 18th century question.

I'm intersted in pursuing the origins and history of the phrase that I've taken for this entry's title. Most likely, you know it from Paradise Lost, specifically Book I, lines 121-22, as spoken by Captain Hubris himself:

"We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal war..."

Google (surprisingly) returns (via Bartleby.com) Wordsworth's sonnet "Malham Cove" in the first position*:

"Was the aim frustrated by force or guile,
When giants scooped from out the rocky ground..."

For the most part, though, Google gives Milton and his Satan ownership of the phrase, and while there were many subsquent users, I'm more interested in Milton's predecessors. Dryden came after, but he retroactively gave it to Virgil in his translation of the Aeneid:

"But truly tell, was it for Force or Guile,
or some Religious end, you rais'd the Pile? (ll. 201-02).

I'm guessing he got it from Milton. A likely (or at least reasonable, or at very least possible) source for Milton is Spenser's The Faerie Queene, V.IV.XXI:

"For all those Knights, the which by force or guile
she doth subdue, she fowly doth entreate..."

A variation also occurs in Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Complaint Upon Love to Reason, with Love's Answer," and it's the earliest occasion of it I have come across thus far:

"Since I was his, hour rested I never,
Nor look to do; and eke the wakey nights
The banished sleep may in no wise recover
By guile and force, over my thralled sprites."

It's likely, then, that it was already current and colloquial by Milton's time and that he simply plucked it from the air. Those I have talked to about it have suggested this or that translation of the bible for a source; one has offered Machiavelli as a possible point of origin, and I must say The Prince does seem a likely candidate given Satan's political business in Paradise Lost (talk about entering a new Principality--that joke will make sense in just a second), but I'd have to find the right contemporary English translation to verify it. Obviously Wyatt knew his Italian fairly well, but I don't know the precise date he composed the above. The Prince, for what it's, appeared in 1532, and Wyatt died ten years later.

The 1910 Harvard Classics translation of The Prince contains the closest corollary phrase to that made (more) famous by Milton:

"Whoever, therefore, on entering a new Princedom, judges it necessary to rid himself of enemies, to conciliate friends, to prevail by force or fraud, to make himself feared yet not hated by his subjects..." (29).

"Force or fraud" is or was, a very superficial search suggests, no less common a construction or pairing as "force or guile." That said, Edward Dacres' 1640 English translation of The Prince renders the above lines as follows:

"Whoever therefore deemes it necessary in his entrance into a new Principality, to secure himself of his enemies, and gain friends, to overcome either by force, or by cunning, to make himself belovd or feard of his people..." (56).

So here we have force and cunning. Not quite force and guile, which is really what I'm after. And this is the earliest traslation of The Prince available to me through EEBO.

I don't have an argument to make about this phrase--at least, not yet--and if it's simply one of those stock phrases that enjoyed (and is still enjoying something of a) vogue, there probably isn't an argument to make. I'm guessing it predates Machiavelli by a fair bit, but I'm already well out of my element. Has anyone out there come across this phrase, and precisely this phrase, before the mid-sixteenth century? I feel certain it must be out there somewhere.

So--to borrow from Jerome K. Jerome--these are just the idle thoughts of an idle fellow. But any tips or leads would be very much appreciated, if for no other reason than to satisfy my undirected and unfruitful curiosity.

*This post is now the first return in a Google search for "by force or guile." How odd!

The Angel and the Algorithm(s)

2009-02-25T20:02:00.012-05:00

For this most part this post is about not having posted recently. It'll therefore be largely free of anything approaching in-depth analysis, discussion, quotation, or purposefulness.

Also I want to finish it before Lost comes on.

I've spent the last few weeks bogged down by an examination of Paradise Lost that I now feel fairly certain will end up being thoroughly redundant. A wiser scholar than I might say there's no shame in not having anything new to say about Paradise Lost; few do. A crueler scholar than I might say I was a fool to have stuck my more than postlapsarian nose into Milton's rather fully explicated Eden in the first place. Not that Milton scholarship is a matter of nil dictum quod non dictum prius, as so many seventeenth-century authors insisted was also not true of whatever it was about which they thought they had something more to say. Rather that (in keeping with my larger and no less painfully self-evident arguments) there's so much that has been said that figuring out what hasn't demands more years of dedicated scholarship than I currently possess or can conveniently acquire. This of course is a typical frustration. I'd have been much better off, as we all surely would, by reaching down to the very dregs of the archive for some all-but-lost scrap of sui-generis something-or-other the very discovery of which would garner me the full range of literary prizes and qualify me for high government office. But I didn't do that. I did this instead. May the sin lie heavy on my head.

Ah; I needed that.

My re-reading of Paradise Lost was quite coincidentally paired with a bit of pop-technocultural non-fiction in the form of Randall Stross's interesting (but mostly underwhelming) Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. The subtitle is what drew me in--my interest in encyclopedias and encyclopedism made it seem a nice way to wet my feet in that sea of technobabble I will have to navigate in the final chapter of this my self-created Sisyphean nightmare. I'm one of those who has managed to use the internet quite happily and effectively without at all understanding it, and as I'm attempting to take the diachronic view of those genres of Enlightenment that specifically involved themselves in the work of information organization it seemed to me a little pre-google-as-verb history of search engines and other forms of web-based mediation would one day serve me well. I didn't start using the internet with any regularity until well after the first-generation consumer ISPs had gone the way of my Apple IIC and AOL's web-within-the-web had been more or less dismissed as the internet's answer to the kiddie-pool. In other words, I didn't really know what was happening until after everything had already changed.

Stross's book helped to fill in the space around my memories of people sneering at AOL's early services and in so doing I noticed some connections to, of all things, Paradise Lost. Some of these are happy accidents of metaphor; others are, I think, more interesting similarities involving genre, technology, and how the fundamental change in both spheres revolves around the problem of information management.

I'm going to set aside Milton's strident Protestantism for the moment and consider the poem from a more secular epistemological perspective. Recent scholarship has amply covered Milton's Baconian leanings and the presence of a divinely authorized version of experimentalism in his Eden. Like many things that to Milton defined the postlapsarian experience -- division of labor, strife between the sexes, the hunger for knowledge -- it would seem that the empiricism and experimentation that were redefining human learning in seventeenth century England also had some purchase in the garden, albeit in a more refined, more perfect, or otherwise crucially different state. That said, the principal means by which Adam learns what he does not know inherently is through the archangelic mediation of Raphael, whom God sends down to provide about four books' worth of expert tutorials on the creation of the universe, the war in heaven, and celestial mechanics. Raphael articulates the proper boundaries of human learning and determines on our first parents' behalf what counts as the knowledge truly worth having and what they should consider irrelevant.

When Eve gets a bit too peckish and ruins it for the rest of us, the pair are turned out of the garden and we lose that wonderfully supernatural means of mediation. In the ghastly postlapsarian world occupied by Milton, which was busily being peered at, picked apart, set ablaze and vivisected by Bacon's followers in the Royal Society, the way back to a complete understanding of God's Creation -- complete knowledge -- was via the diligent collection of epistemic fragments. Whereas Raphael once told us what was essential to forming a perfect understanding the universe, we now had to take the comprehensive approach -- learning as we went and determining for ourselves as best we could the good from the bad, the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant. Progress now depended on mediators of our own making, whether in the form of scientific methods that produced a better class of knowledge, instruments that extended the power of our limited corporeal faculties, or textual compendia that collected the knowledge worth keeping and preserved it for the benefit of posterity.

Now back to AOL. In its earliest days, AOL customers who logged on to the service accessed what technocrats refer to as "the walled garden" model of the internet. AOL employed a staff of people whose job it was to identify the best sources of information online and point users to the relevant sources when search inquiries were made. Ideally, then, all of the information contained within AOL's walled garden would be good--relevant, reliable, what have you. Beyond the wall was chaos--a realm of information good and bad, useful and useless, present but not organized. No sense troubling one's self with that.

The problem, of course, is that human mediation of the kind that made the garden such a safe place is not efficiently scalable. We're no angels; humans can only read so much, and once the amount of information through which AOL's staffers had to crawl in search of good value became too large, they could no longer provide the same quality of service. Users, moreover--in their unending desire for more and better--began to consider the garden more hindrance than haven. It was only a matter of time before the walls came down.

The web, to a greater extent than any other entity in human history, represents the comprehensive--the place where everything can be recorded, transmitted, preserved (preservation is a sticky subject here -- consult your local archivist about the foolhardiness of relying on digital technologies for long-term durability). The amount of knowledge available online far surpasses the ability of any individual to find what's useful. Enter Google and their (in)famous Algorithm, which acts as the digital answer to Milton's Raphael. The algorithm now identifies the essential from within the comprehensive: it mediates the masses of information and returns to users a list of sources theoretically organized by relevance.

Obviously, the algorithm is not as perfect as the angel, though perhaps to most people they're almost equally incomprehensible. I'm not entirely sure how the algorithm works in conjunction with crawlers, loggers, indices, etc., and for the most part Google is happy to keep it that way. I will say that I frequently treat its results with as much innocence as Adam did Raphael--a phenomenon that concerns Google's detractors and competitors in the world of seach engines.
Not everything Google points one to is good -- Wikipedia (another institution that conflates the comprehensive with the complete and has experienced its fair share of credibility concerns) frequently turns up at the top of search results -- and those in the know can work the system to their advantage.

And of course Raphael did not attempt to profit from click-through ads.

I have more to say about all this, but I don't (alas) know enough about it yet to do so.

Lost was excellent tonight, I thought.

epicism

2008-12-10T14:35:00.008-05:00

rare.

[f. EPIC + -ISM.]

The mental habit characteristic of the epic poet.

1878 T. SINCLAIR Mount 166 But the lyricism and the balance of epicism in his nature saved him.
____________________________________________________________________

My compliments as always to the OED. I've been thinking, as always, about encyclopedism, and recently I've been reading about lyricism (the spell-checker embedded within this blogging software recognizes the latter but not the former--the same holds true in MS Word). I think it's safe to say we recognize encyclopedism as a word -- if we don't, then we should -- but why we should have lyricism without epicism is entirely beyond me.

"Epicism," as the entry above suggests, enjoyed brief usage in the nineteenth century. Sinclair's is the only example recorded by the OED, but according to this page it's not necessarily the earliest. (A quick search of Google Books confirmed D. K. Sandford's use of the term in his 1830 translation of The Greek Grammar of Frederick Thiersch.) In contrast, the OED credits Thomas Grey with the first recording of "lyricism[s]" in 1760, written in a letter to William Mason, a minor poet and Gray's literary executor. I suppose it would be reasonable to suggest that in the latter half of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth the lyric had a much better time of it than the epic, which for the most part had been appropriated by a host of novelists and one ambitious Scotsman. Epics as the Augustans would have thought of them had gone out of the world with Paradise Lost, and if they'd had the word epicism in their day I doubt very much they'd have wanted anyone alive after 1744 to use it. That of course explains neither its abence in the 18th century nor its apparent creation and presence in the 19th, but I'll leave such things to the lexicographers.

There's something to be said for Sinclair's deployment of the terms as opposites; lyricism balanced by epicism. Not having read Sinclair, I can't accurately explain precisely what's at work in the statement, but I can pluck it from its context and make an eighteenth-century argument that's relevant to my work with encyclopedias and encyclopedism. Part of what's at stake must refer to scope--the narrow subject of the lyric vs. the expansive grasp of the epic. The author of the Memoirs of Literature for Monday, June 5, 1710 writes that "Lyrick Verses, so call’d because they were sung upon the Lyre, are a Branch of Epick Poetry, and contain the Description of a single Fact, or of a single Passion, and Ceremony” (49). The epic accounts for all or much--the complete range of human characters, emotions, etc., all deployed in the course of relating a complete action. The lyric accounts for one part of that range--or so this author seems to suggest. If lyricism truly entails that kind of specificity (along with its attachment to sentiment or poetic enthusiasm, as the OED and Grey suggest), then what might epicism be meant to comprehend? What is the "mental habit," as the OED puts it, of the epic poet?

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the epic poet was though to require a comprehensive imagination and knowledge as well as the ability to digest and organize his (most frequently his--there are few female epic poets of note, though Dacier of course translated Homer, and epic-by-proxy certainly comes close to the "real" thing in our post-elevation-of-original-genius understanding of authorship) knowledge into a unified literary work. Eighteenth-century poets and critics (including the likes of Dryden and Pope) certainly gave this faculty to Homer and Virgil; they identified Chaucer as having a comprehensive imagination; they said as much of Shakespeare; and of course, they honored Milton with such praise.

I'm bringing up Milton for two reasons: 1) yesterday marked his 400th birthday and 2) one can't talk about epic in the eighteenth century without dealing with it in one way or another. I'm writing in part about generic durability (the usefulness of genres over time) in the context of the search for complete knowledge, and it's widely acknowledged that Milton wrote the last, best example of epic poetry in the English language (yes, we can make room for Byron and others if you really insist, but the epics of the Romantic poets were either acknowledged as incomplete or considered to be too different from the classical model to make the grade). As Marvell observed in his prefatory poem:

"Thou hast not missed one thought that could be fit,
And all that was improper does omit:
So that no room is here for writers left,
But to detect their ignorance or theft" (27-30).

No room for writers left; Milton's successors--Blackmore and a few scattered others excepted--treated the genre like it died in its perfection. What remains for a poet to do, when he or she believed that in Paradise Lost Milton had achieved the following, from another prefatory poem by Milton's friend Samuel Barrow? (trans. from the Latin):

"You who read Paradise Lost, the magnificent poem by the great Milton, what do you read but the story of everything? The book includes all things, and the origins of all things, and their destinies and ends. The innermost secrets of the great universe are revealed, and whatever lies hidden in the entire world is there set out: the land and breadth of the sea, and the depths of the sky amd the sulphurous fire-vomiting den of Erebus--all that lives on earth and in the sea, and everything that lives in dark Tartarus and in the bright kingdoms of Heaven above; whatever is included anywhere within any boundaries, and also that which is without boundary: chaos and infinite God, and what is even more without limit, if there is anything that is more without limit, the love towards mankind embodies in Christ...Anyone who will read this poem will think that Homer only sang of frogs, Virgil only of gnats."

Clearly an argument is being made here for a particular kind of epic comprehensiveness that made Paradise Lost what Johnson would later call, in assent with others, "a book of universal knowledge" (The Lives of the English Poets). At stake in these claims, however, is precisely what is meant by knowledge, the definition and nature of which were in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries changing with the advent of empiricism and the efforts undertaken by the Royal Society, its members, and their like across Europe.

Most of the fallout from the above is the subject and substance of my second chapter (in order of presentation rather than composition), so I don't want to give away the best (worst) bits here. In any case the chapter is currently standing in the corner giving me dirty looks as if to say "go on then, I DARE you to write me. What are you? Chicken?" This has been way way of making a threatening gesture towards it. Epicism. A useful term in no way current in the early eighteenth but still useful--how do discuss the existence of something before the word identifying it exists? Signifiers! Signifieds! Can we talk of culture before the word "culture?" Yes. Can I speak of epicism before "epicism?" Surely...?

Devouring Time

2008-11-02T18:48:00.002-05:00

Flummoxed as I am by my investigation of collaborative v. individual composition in the early 18th century and the respective connections of each method to contemporaneous concepts of comprehensive completeness (the alliteration here is an unhappy coincidence, I swear--except, perhaps, for "coincidence"), I thought I'd take yet another break from thinking about something that doesn't matter to think about something that doesn't matter in a much more interesting way.

It seems to me--and I know I'm not alone in this--that the eighteenth century (or eighteenth-century studies, at any rate) has in the last few years achieved new purchase on modernity. I am probably skewing too much towards a kind of presentism in my own work because of the links (dare I say patterns? No, not until I have tenure--tenure!--probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities) I see between individual, institutional, and disciplinary responses to the proliferation (or re-proliferation, thanks very much to digitization) of print in the eighteenth and our own centuries.

Modern technology holds out the promise of advances in learning forestalled by the limitations of print technology, but some of the old obstacles that shaped or altered the course of knowledge production during the Enlightenment have once again been "wired" into new technologies by the limitations of our still untranscended humanness. In short, mortality continues to get in the way of everything I'd like to accomplish--ie., complete knowledge. When faced with the opportunity to surf through an expanding sea of texts, it seems that our first response is the application of some method that will help us to account for less of it. Encyclopedists, system-makers, magazine editors, even novelists and poets have spent centuries applying methods designed to serve this function. So have we: canons, syllabuses, periods, etc. You have 14 weeks to teach a survey course of British Literature--what goes, what stays? I recently listened to a very interesting talk the central argument of which depended on an ECCO-wide quantitative analysis of select key words in full-text searches (demonstrating the merit of the method was also part of the point). This accounts for thousands of texts--in a very limited way. Much less of those texts "comes across" to the "reader" -- or, in this example, the auditor. This method mediates the archive in such a way as to make the comprehensive comprehensible, but this comprehensibility requires a narrower, nigh-paradoxical understanding of what "comprehensive" might mean.

And it STILL took months to accomplish. The problems are many, but the first, as always given our mortality, is time. Which leads me, by circuitous route, to my new favorite clock and the real purpose of this post. As usual I come late to the game, but I've only just learned about it:

The Corpus Clock, designed by John Taylor, was unveiled in September by Stephen Hawking. The 24 karat gold-plated clock--the face of which measures 1.5 meters in diameter--hangs outside the Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge. I am fascinated by it for several reasons, but the primary attractions are these:

1) The escapement is of the grasshopper variety; in fact, it's the largest grasshopper escapement in the world. The grasshopper escapement was designed by eighteenth-century English clockmaker John Harrison, whose marine chronometers were instrumental in solving the longitude problem; Taylor specifically included the grasshopper escapement as an homage to Harrison's accomplishment.

2) The clock has no hands; instead the time is told by LED lights that shine out through slits in the faceplate. Thus the clock clearly combines eighteenth- and twenty-first-century technologies in order to do the "same thing" (tell time) in a different way. The clock does not keep "accurate" time in the traditional sense of the term. Rather it keeps a kind of "relative" time, slowing down or speeding up to reflect our perceptions of time's irregular passing. Or our irregular perceptions of time's passing. Or our perception of time's passing irregularity. Or something.

3) THE CHRONOPHAGE! Taylor made the grasshopper escapement into a proper, giant, terrifying, monstrous grasshopper beastie with a working jaw that opens and closes with the turning of the wheel. The escapement thus appears to eat the time as it passes--hence the term Chronophage. That grasshopper has swallowed up my twenties; it's now nibbling on my thirties; and if I don't get a move on with this dissertation it'll have eaten up all my best years and left me nothing to show for it. Taylor meant his monster to be disturbing, and it is.

So I suppose I should get on with it. I take much more solace in the Clock of the Long Now, which reminds me that my life is one in a very long series of lives lived by other people. It depersonalizes the passage of time a bit by reminding me of time's scale. So now I have clocks at both ends of the spectrum--one, a 10,000 year clock suggesting that my lifespan amounts to precious little, the other reminding me that every second is precious and is being devoured one at a time.

For an explanation and description of the Corpus Clock by its designer, click here.

Anathem

2008-10-13T18:33:00.012-04:00

Having received one of the three seals of approval needed to proceed to the next stage of the terrible life choice I've made, I decided to treat myself to a brief sojourn from it-that-must-not-be-named in order to spend some time with something not yet on any syllabus anywhere.

I first read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon four or five summers ago; three years ago I read Quicksilver and The Confusion, the first two parts of The Baroque Cycle. I finally got round to part three, The System of the World, two years ago. If you're not familiar with Stephenson's works, they're incredibly complex, extraordinarily detailed, and meticulously researched. The three volumes of The Baroque Cycle are among my favorite works of historical fiction, and they certainly top the list of modern novels set in the long eighteenth century. (If anyone can point me to more, suggestions are welcome--no more David Liss for the moment, please, unless you are absolutely sure I'd find The Whiskey Rebels compelling.) Stephenson's writing lacks emotional complexity, his female characters are generally underdeveloped, and his endings don't always pay off to the extent you'd like, but the worlds he creates and the plots he weaves through them are thoroughly engrossing. At no point over the course of The Baroque Cycle's roughly 2000 pages did I feel like I was wasting my time. In short, I'm a fan.

Stephenson's latest is called Anathem, a term mutually derived from "anthem" and "anathema." It's set well into what we would identify as our future--so much so that our own time has become ancient history. The reason I can write about this novel in a blog ostensibly dedicated to all things Enlightenment is summarized quite nicely by Stephenson himself in one the "extras" available on his website (careful if you visit; you might encounter spoilers): "the metaphysical thread linking The Baroque Cycle to Anathem begins with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Monadology, available in various translations, online and otherwise. The idea was submerged for much of the 18th and 19th Centuries but gained currency during the 20th as the inspiration for background-independent formulations of physics." I haven't read Monadology, but I am familiar enough with its basic propositions that I can follow the line from the 18th to the 21st to whatever century Anathem takes place in.

Stephenson explores a number of fairly heady philosophies that range from Platonism and almost-but-not-entirely-un-veiled theories about Ideal Forms to twentieth and twenty-first-century formulations of quantum mechanics. I'm no philosopher, but in addition to the more easily recognized philosophies that emerged from ancient Greece as well as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers like Descartes, Liebniz, Locke, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I managed to spot some of what I knew from my brief dalliances with general relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and superstring theory. I've always found these things fascinating if a bit over my head, and there are definitely moments at which I felt myself holding on to the book for dear life, but as usual Stephenson gives you enough to keep up even if you have to let some things fall by the wayside. The protagonist, Fraa Erasmas ("fraa" is a title rather than a name, and it carries essentially the same value as our "fra," though without a religious connotation) is a nineteen-year-old student in what amounts to a kind of think-tank, so from the outset learning (mostly in the form of what characters refer to as "dialogs") is foregrounded as a matter of critical importance; characters and readers alike are clearly in for some education.

Speaking of education, students, and schools, readers of the Harry Potter and His Dark Materials series will certainly see parallels; Stephenson takes elements from both and embeds them in a much more sophisticated universe not readily accessible by younger readers. Stephenson has spoken about the failure of Rowling's works to break into what we (snooty bastards that we are) would call Literature, and with Anathem I think he's attempting to elevate the parts he likes to a higher plane. The "concent" in which much of the early action takes place reads like equal parts Pullman's Oxford and Rowling's Hogwarts, which of course were already connected; wands, magic spells, and armored bears aside, Stephenson seems to be portraying some of what might go on in such places at the graduate level. The read therefore is neither as fast nor as fun, but it is in its way far more intellectually rewarding--if, at the end, a bit joyless.

There's a bit more I'd like to say about the connection of Anathem to the Long Now Foundation, but Stephenson does it for me (again, check the website), so really this paragraph amounts to a plug for that entirely fascinating organization. I'll just say in conclusion that some critics have described Anathem as--well, dull. They're not entirely wrong; it lacks the zip of The Baroque Cycle and the immediacy of Cryptonomicon. Thus far, however, I'm thinking about Anathem more in the aftermath of reading it than I did with the others and liking it a bit more in the finish than the palate. If you've read it or are going to read it, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

For some of the weird, some of the world, and some of the words from the dictionary provided alongside both, check out the following widget. But don't watch the trailer. It's awful.

Swiss Miss

2008-08-29T10:07:00.004-04:00

Justice has finally been served. Today, the government of the Swiss state of Glarus, in conjunction with both the Protestant and Catholic churches, officially exonerated Anna Goeldi -- the last woman tried and executed for witchcraft in Europe.

One might ask why I have chosen to take note of this. I could say that the DNC coverage has put me in a political mood, and that speeches condemning torture have made Goeldi's story seem strangely relevant. She confessed under torture to having made a pact with the devil, who appeared to her (as he does) in the shape of a black dog.

Her testimony did not lead to the arrest of the devil. Nor, indeed, of the dog.

I could say it's because she was held on the baseless charge of feeding needles to her master's daughter by supernatural means, and subsequently tried by the Protestant Church council -- which did not have the legal authority to try her.

I could also say it's because this brings Pamela to mind. Goeldi left her home in Sennwald looking for work and found a position as a maidservant in the house of Jakob Tschudi, a physician and magistrate. According to local journalist Walter Hauser, Tschudi quite fancied her. The two had an affair, but Tschudi had to have her silenced when she threatened to go public. His prayer was answered when the church council had her beheaded by sword-stroke in the public square.

Say what you will about Squire B., but at least he didn't have poor Pamela done for witchcraft.

Of course not, you will say; Richardson published Pamela in 1740. Witchcraft had gone the way of aether, eye-beams, and decent epic poetry. Perhaps, I will say; but that didn't stop the church council from returning a conviction for the crime in 1782.

This is why I'm taking note. The court probably no longer believed in witchcraft, though it remained a crime. Officially they convicted her for poisoning, but as the act was non-lethal it shouldn't have carried the death penalty. So, really, witchcraft it was. But, according to the government that has just exonerated her, "Goeldi's execution was even more incomprehensible as it happened in the Age of Enlightenment when 'those who made the judgment regarded themselves as educated people.'" Hauser makes a similar claim: "Educated people here did not believe in witchcraft in 1782."

It's a tad difficult to tell about precisely what the officials and other folks of Glarus feel worse: the injustice committed against an innocent woman, or the idea that people will think their ancestors still believed in witchcraft during the Age of Enlightenment. They're caught between the devil (or a dog) and the deep blue sea: history can remember them as having either been evil or ignorant.

I must say I'm not entirely sure that if those were my only options I wouldn't rather choose to go down as evil.

On a separate note--I'm not sure where I stand on the subject of overdue government apologies for crimes committed ages ago by people long dead. I can see their symbolic value, I suppose, but at the same time they strike me as being a bit silly. Was anyone really waiting around for the government to speak up before deciding where to come down on Anna Goeldi's guilt or innocence? And what's this government really got to do with the one that looked the other way two and a half centuries ago?

The library's the thing

2008-08-04T12:47:00.004-04:00

It's been about four months since anyone has commented on a post. This saddens but does not surprise me. Really I do prefer to do all the talking myself, as it saves time and prevents arguments.

But, in the interest of generating conversation, and in the even greater interest of not working on my dissertation, I'd like to share a brief anecdote and then solicit the feedback of my readers.

I've always wanted to pretend to have readers.

A couple of years ago, I paid for a lifetime membership to librarything.com. In my more optimistic days I thought I might have a future in academia, and so believed that my library would soon grow out of all compass and want some form of functional catalog. (I see by the little red squiggly dots we're no longer spelling that "catalogue.") I entered everything I owned and have continued to do so, but really it's been an exercise in narcissism. I for reasons passing understanding aspire to have more obscure books; I stand back and marvel at my almost oppressively canonical author cloud; I wonder when my "eighteenth-century" tag will finally dwarf all other tags by a ludicrous margin. It's full-on gloriously self-indulgent book-nerd exhibitionism. But it hasn't been useful.

Until today. Having watched the trailer for Watchmen, I found myself wanting to reread it. I couldn't remember, though, if I already owned it. I was about to buy a copy when I remembered librarything and decided to check it. I searched my books, and there it was. Saved me eleven bucks, plus shipping.

Provided, of course, I can find it, which brings me to the point. Though my library is exceedingly small, my apartment is even smaller, so shelf space is at a premium. Like any actual library, I at some point had to make a decision about what I wanted to have immediately accessible and what could go into the apartment-dweller's version of off-site storage: some plastic bins shoved under my bed, in my closet, etc. Right now, sitting in prime positions on a very comfortable bit of pine, are books that I have not touched in years. Meanwhile, the book I want is no doubt at the very bottom of an unmarked box buried under three years' worth of stuff that even Superfund isn't prepared to deal with. Therefore, as has been the case several times this summer at the British Library, recovery of my requested item could take up to a week. The point is, I got it wrong -- I did not accurately anticipate my likely needs, and failed to make critical decisions about space according to the right criteria. I think I got tripped by vanity; thinking back on how I went about it at the time, I left anything that could be classified as Literature on the shelves and left everything else to the mercy of the dust-bunnies. Old textbooks, pleasure-reading, etc. went first. Eventually the Russian lit fell, then the French. The whole of the 20th century followed, and at the moment it's not looking good for 1850-1900.

So my questions are: 1) do you have a librarything account, and 2) if so, has it been useful? 3) If not, have you ever had to waste half a day looking for a book you couldn't possibly have known you'd need when you deprioritized it and 4) if so, have you actually found doing so a perversely rewarding experience? Lastly--5) how are your books organized now, and by what criteria did you determine their arrangement?

Size Matters

2008-07-16T11:51:00.004-04:00

I had intended to use that phrase for a section of my chapter on encyclopedias, but it'll probably get folded in to some larger chunk with an equally inappropriate heading that someone with more sense than I have will eventually make me change.

The last part of that sequence has thus far gone for far more than mere headings.

It's a subject that has been endlessly covered by scholars of compendia from antiquity straight through the eighteenth century. Ann Blair has called it the "experience of overabundance," which is a terrific phrase for it as people have been whining about the "multitude" of books long before the printing press made it abundantly clear (overabundantly clear?) that all that already was was going to become a mere fraction of what would be. I could make that clearer but won't. Vincent de Beauvais, for example, compelled by the multitude of books and the "slipperiness of memory," put together 10,000 chapters worth of at-hand information about the arts, sciences and history in his Speculum Maium, or "Great Mirror," which went unrivaled in size and scope until the mid-eighteenth century. And he did it in the thirteenth century.

One of the main reasons both encyclopedias and periodicals (the reviews and magazines) are the length they are is because of time and space restrictions--or so you'd think. They often say, "I'd have added more here, but production is already behind schedule," or "the additional expense would price us out of the market" or somesuch. Paper got cheaper and people got richer, of course, so in the never-ending quest for epistemological completeness encyclopedias did in fact get longer. A lot longer. As in measurable in feet longer. And heavier, and more expensive. If I don't plan to keep them on the floor I need the Army Corps of Engineers to make sure my shelves can support the weight.

But then there's the reader's part in all this. Wikipedia, about which I don't know nearly enough, is theoretically released from the material aspects of length. Server space might be an issue, but not really--or at least, not to the extent that space was an issue for its meatspace ancestors. But Wikipedia still has length restrictions on its articles, and that to me is terribly interesting.

Harris' Lexicon Technicum breaks everything down into dictionary definitions. Chambers has articles that run to several pages, but in principle it relies on cross-references to render the connections between all the parts of knowledge. The first Britannica digests it all into systems and treatises because the cross-referencing was confusing and didn't work. There's a tension between length and comprehension--too short, you lose the sense of the whole; too long, you start to lose the details. This is the limitation imposed by the human--this is why to some extent the medium doesn't matter.

Wikipedia has (relatively) unlimited space; paper means nothing, shelf space is irrelevant. But we still get this as a big 'old flag on top of the entry on the Roman Empire:

This article may be too long.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page; if necessary, split the content into subarticles and keep this article in a summary style.

The page on article length, to be fair, does suggest that there are in fact technical limitations. Some browsers apparently balk at things that are too long. But the readability issue comes first, and it says this:

"Readers may tire of reading a page much longer than about 6,000 to 10,000 words, which roughly corresponds to 30 to 50 KB of readable prose."

Now if I read 6,000 to 10,000 words about the same thing divided over ten different pages, am I not going to tire?

Kurzweil better be right. Wikipedia is just silly without a transhuman.

I wish this were better thought out, but I'm hungry and late for King Lear.

All the Angle(r)s

2008-04-27T15:40:00.002-04:00

In my recently restarted audit of all things compleat--about 900 between 1600-1700, going by ESTC title searches, and about (gulp) 5000 between 1700-1800, I decided to do a little preliminary secondary research into what I imagined would be a largely overlooked body of literature. It gives me no end of pleasure, and absolutely no surprise, to have discovered Defoe adding his two cents to the genre--he gave us at least four "compleats," two of which duplicated the titles of long-running 17th-century works, one that I think deploys the trope ironically, and one--"A compleat system of magick"--that is rather more of a history and which therefore, I think, belongs to a different subgenre. (The boundaries between all these categories, are, as you'd expect, fairly porous, and if early novels frequently called themselves the histories of so-and-so, a lot of histories about non-human subjects did the same.)

As a sort of digressive point of interest, Defoe explains that those who were once called "Magicians" were nothing more than mathematicians, or Men of Science, who "stor'd with knowledge and learning, as learning went in those days, were a kind of walking Dictionary to other people" (2). Magic = Wisdom = Comprehensive Knowledge.

But back to my initial point--why, one wonders, did the North Dakota Quarterly decide in 2006 to make Izaak Walton's "The Compleat Angler" the focus of its interest to the tune of four complete articles, and why have the six most recent MLA entries turning up with a keyword search of "compleat" turned out to be about angling?

There is (he said because he couldn't resist) something fishy going on.

Harry Potter and the Plagiarist's Spellbook

2008-04-21T13:46:00.002-04:00

As my dissertation is once again gnashing its teeth at me -- these things turn on you if you don't feed them -- I thought I'd spend a minute luxuriating in yet another run-in of contemporary pop culture and my eighteenth-century literary interests.

For a more detailed and no doubt intelligent explication of what follows, I refer you to this article.

The item in my glib and unnecessarily condemnatory post title is (as those of you more versed in Harry Potter paratexts and fan fiction generally will know) more than a collection of the charms scattered throughout Rowling's series of books. I haven't been to the site whereat the document originated and frankly I can't be asked, but from what I've gathered it seems one Steven Vander Ark has compiled a collection of Potternalia and organized it into something of an online reference source (a "Harry Potter Lexicon"). It got accolades and commendations from Rowling herself and was generally well-thought of until someone got the bright idea of putting it on paper and making it available for sale, thus taking it out of the comfortably not-for-profit world of web-based mega-coterie circulation. Rowling et al. have (somewhat suddenly) labeled Vander Ark a thief and a plagiarist and are suing him for copyright violation.

The legal representative of the press behind the lexicon calls it a legal way "to organize and discuss the complicated and very elaborate world of Harry Potter."

Rowling says the lexicon "fails to include any of the commentary and discussion that enrich the Web site" and calls it 'nothing more than a rearrangement' of her own material."

The haphazard application of fair-use principles and the number of virtual violators of copyright law can render the web a sort of Knockturn Alley with respect to intellectual property. What's REALLY at stake is Rowling's not wanting someone horning in on her future profits--she plans to put out her own Potterpedia and is understandably, if jealously, guarding her market share. But it's more fun to consider the question from the perspective of originality, and the old problem of what it is precisely that an author owns. In terms of legal action, this question goes back at least to the early 18th century, when the passage of the Statute of Queen Anne in 1710 first established authorial ownership privileges. The author, as the act would have it, "owns" the arrangement of the words that constitute the text. This arrangement is unique and cannot be duplicated without the author's giving permission or receiving compensation, within a stipulated number of years.

That's all well and good, and though the act was scarcely enforced (hardly any authors presented cases before courts in the first ten years of the act's passing) it still set up something of a groundwork.

The issue, however, complex as it is, gets even more complicated with the case of encyclopedias, which is what the HP Lexicon purports to be. Throughout the eighteenth century, and particularly in its latter half and last quarter, encyclopedias pilfered from primary sources and each other with relative impunity. William Smellie, compiler of the first Encyclopedia Britannica, claimed to have put the thing together with a pair of scissors. Though he wrote a few entries himself, he touted his great contribution to the world of knowledge as having far more to do with the arrangement and organization of his materials than his role in producing the materials themselves.

One might also think of the quasiencyclopedic texts put out in the wake of Richardson's Clarissa, which are probably more in keeping with this case: a book or books the length of which make information organization difficult necessitate (and I think necessitate is a reasonable word to use, here) a kind of generic intercession. Something must help the reader to organize the information by deconstructing the system it constituted; the mind cannot hold it all at once, and must look elsewhere for assistance on those occasions when supplementary memory is required. The novels, because they are novels, and because the generic codes that delineate them from encyclopedias have nicely hardened up in the aftermath of Tristram Shandy, no longer have embedded encyclopedical (another neologism!) features. Novels scarcely ever have indexes (editions of Richardson's novels did), and some very few have glossaries (the articles refer to Vander Ark's text as an encyclopedia, he calls it a lexicon--there's a difference, but don't ask them what it is).

This is not to say that Vander Ark hasn't stepped over the line; his A-Z rearrangement of Rowling's texts may well constitute a violation of current US and/or UK copyright law. What I take immense pleasure in is the fact that this problem of copyright and encyclopedic reconstitution has been around for a couple of hundred years and we still haven't entirely sorted out precisely how to deal with it.

Technocanonization

2008-04-08T21:19:00.008-04:00

I recently received the following CFP:

The Eighth Fordham University Graduate English Association Conference
Innovation and Evolution

October 4, 2008
New York, NY

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the impulse to change, improve and evolve. What sparks literary innovation? How does social change reflect itself in emerging cultural artifacts? How will technological innovations manifest themselves in our cultural productions in the coming months, years, or decades? Is the impulse to innovate a historical phenomenon, or is the word innovation a misnomer? What myths of individual or social progress shape our reading and criticism? What is the potential backlash of innovation? How have the academic disciplines evolved (or devolved)? How and why have genres evolved over time, and how have new genres found a place in the literary canon?

Given my dissertation interests (the proliferation of print and its influence on generic development), this seems like it should be straight up my alley. I have already done some work on the novel and encyclopedia, and I imagine I could mold part of my novel chapter to meet the requirements of the conference. That said, I have put in bold something of particular interest to me -- something that is clearly (and worryingly) becoming of greater interest to those at my own and other universities: the impact of technological innovations.

The first thing I think of is online secondary research databases and what I refer to as the JSTOR effect. In a recent class of mine, we were discussing Dickens. I managed to get an article published on Our Mutual Friend in Dickens Studies Annual a year or so ago, and joked to my students that I didn't fret over them seeking it out because it wasn't on JSTOR. Rather, it's moldering away in meatspace, rightfully being ignored by those who already have enough digital material to root through without tip-toeing through the labyrinthine stacks of the library and risking doing themselves a damage by falling off one of those wheeled step-stool contraptions. You're taking your life in your hands, going after something inconveniently shelved. Best leave it alone--if it's not online, it must not be worth having, anyway; someone somewhere who makes decisions about what merits the medium clearly concluded for whatever reason that the poor folks at DSA didn't make the top tier. Or perhaps the poor folks at DSA had neither the means nor the inclination to seek digital distribution. Obviously, I don't like this or agree with it, but if it isn't already the mentality of most undergraduates it soon will be, and from this generation of undergraduates comes the next generation of graduate students, comes the next generation of professors, comes the next generation of undergraduates. The new library is digital; materiality is immaterial; the part replaces the whole; discourse is therefore restricted. This much is just a rehashing of Foucault and Liebniz and a whole bunch of other would-be librarians throughout the ages who fretted the irreconcilable tension between the essential and the comprehensive and ultimately had to make the same sorts of choices that are still made today: what to keep, what to throw away.

Every new technological medium constitutes a new way to manage the chaos--a theoretically temporary but practically long-term act of implicitly hierarchical reductionism. The pattern proceeds from the encyclopedia right through to the great digital archives: out there is everything. For our purposes, everything is infinite, and infinity is meaningless. So really there is only something, and therefore necessarily not other things. The encyclopedias have everything, but don't really; the libraries have everything, but don't really; JSTOR has everything, but doesn't really. What they have--or aspire to have, or think they aspire to have, or imply that they have--is the best of everything. This book, but not this book, this article but not that, and so on. That's all they can do. What constitutes the "best" changes, of course, but there's always a judgment being made that suggests some sort of value. Book A is online. Book B lives in the stacks; Book C lives in the underground facility; Book D lives at some location three days away; Book E lives in the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perhaps B through D will all be reborn as PDFs eventually, but the immediate message of the medium is one of temporally based valuation and hierarchization. First things first, as they say.

The "new" genres of the 18th century, and the new features of some old genres, as I'm on about in my dissertation, are technological developments: new media designed to reduce the everything to the something and make the something into everything: the universal canon, everything you need to know. Not everything there is.

I have a Kindle now, and I quite like it. I particularly like the way it fits the pattern of reduction and hierarchization. Never mind the shockingly McLuhanite recreation of the appearance of the printed page--talk about the old medium becoming the contents of the new!--but consider what's available and what's not. Neither the Kindle nor any other electronic reader is likely to render paper entirely obsolete, but imagine an increasing portion of the population choosing this medium over print because (after the initial capital outlay) the books are cheaper, the acquisition is faster, the device is more transportable, etc. All of this should sound familiar. This readership has, at the moment, "more than 110,000 books available, including more than 90 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers." You can also get:

Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN's Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post—all updated wirelessly throughout the day.

Boldface added. Kindle is a business venture, they want to attract customers, so they're making the most popular stuff available--the TOP stuff. Whatever constitutes topness on the internet is being carried over to the Kindle--but the Kindle, for the moment, simply does not give access to the not-top stuff. Where's the cutoff? More than 250 top blogs (who knew there were 250 top blogs? Top according to what? Hits? I have no idea)? Is that 260? 270? Why not 271? Who decided where to draw the line, and close off access to those who have decided to make this their principal, if not only, way of reading? This is nothing short of a technodetermined canon--a technocanon that could for some constitute a new, smaller everything. And who on earth is going to read 110,000 books, all the bestsellers, 250+ blogs and however many newspapers?

If we choose these new media--these new technologies--we (for the foreseeable future, anway) accept the temporal hierarchy, the notion that some things are only to be had later, if at all. It is in the nature of these media to demand these hierarchies; not everything can be made available all at once. So the necessity of a canon is technodetermined, but the contents of the canon derive from another, equally necessary but far less transparent process of human mediation. Information has to get through someone (person, institution, policy) in order to get to the Kindle in order to get to us. This has to happen; the human element can't be removed, even if it can be directed. If you set Kindle policy, or JSTOR policy, or ECCO policy, what order would YOU do things in?

None of this is particularly earth-shattering, I'm sure--I was just set off by the CFP. I look forward to watching the progress of archival projects like JSTOR and ECCO and EEBO and so on. I'm no utopian--I don't think they'll ever get around to everything. And even if they did, it wouldn't matter, because I can't read everything.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the expanding archive will simply result in new opportunities in specialization. We will define whole mini-canons with our search terms, and as we need to weed out more of the more we'll pick narrower and narrower parameters. We will have to know more about less because the more is unmanageable. What does thorough research look like with a million documents at your fingertips? What first book wouldn't take a lifetime to write? The comprehensive archive cannot be understood comprehensively. The seventeenth-century librarians knew it; the eighteenth-century encyclopedists knew it; Sterne even sent up the idea in Tristram Shandy. Hence ever-increasing specialization.

Hello, my name is X. I'm interested in January 1st - January 31st, 1701 studies. What's YOUR period? Oh, you don't agree with periodicity. You say you study three-footed marmosets named Trevor in lyric poetry? I see.

I seem to have gone mad.

Austen hates a know-it-all

2008-02-13T16:17:00.003-05:00

In delivering a decidedly off-the-cuff and mercifully perfunctory critique of what I am for the moment referring to as an accidental chapter of my so-called dissertation, one of my directors asked, in so many words, "what about Austen?"

By which she meant, how could I justify my argument that Sterne mocked the encyclopedical (a perilous neologism) projects of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels with Tristram Shandy because by 1759 the novel was in danger of collapsing under its own weight? Given that--as is certainly the case--we so incontestably have Richardson and Fielding to thank for what did in fact become the novel as we now know it? And further, given that Austen just as incontestably carried forth a great many features of their novels? In short, she asked (thought not with hostility--she seemed rather pleased with the chapter), "are you quite sure you've not done something incredibly stupid? I ask because it's a question you're likely to get in a job talk."

And for the first time while under the lights of this particular examiner, I had a response.

Sterne, I said, declared the end of the encyclopedic novel (the nineteenth centuryists among you are lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks--I should say that "long" does not equal encyclopedic, that Moby Dick did not enjoy tremendous success in its time, and that rather than wipe the form from the face of the earth Sterne merely assisted in highlighting its inadequacies) by writing one that wonderfully fails to achieve what it sets out to accomplish. Certain features of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels were perfectly valuable and durable--psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, intricate plots, what have you. But systematicity and epistemological comprehensiveness were untenable; complete knowledge was not to be had in any book, be it encyclopedia or novel. Things have to be left out.

Obviously Richardson and Fielding left out a great deal. Their texts weren't comprehensive--but they aspired to a kind of completeness that created a false epistemological totality that I think Sterne thought made them terribly dated and rendered them obsolete rather than immortal. Immortality, Tristram Shandy suggests, is in questions rather than answers; the possibility of further discovery rather than a complete record of the supposedly immutable. Sterne elevates the incomplete and the fragmentary in place of the complete and comprehensive because no work could ever be both comprehensive and complete.

What on earth has this to do with Jane Austen?

From a letter dated Tuesday 9 February, 1813:

Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick Quarto Volumes, which one always sees in the Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the World.--I detest a Quarto. --Capt. Paisely's Book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a Man who condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo.

Austen is not commenting here on novels, of course--but she is remarking upon a taste for comprehensive knowledge. She had been applied to for information on the oath of Bell Book and Candle, and had none to give (the oath turns out to be part of an archaic excommunication ceremony of the Catholic church--this makes me think of the excommunication that takes place in Tristram Shandy, but of course there's nothing more there than coincidence). There's no need to be acquainted with everything in the world, Austen suggests, and I see no reason why that philosophy shouldn't have been carried over into the composition of her own works.

One might call this a stretch, but when one considers (as I asked my interrogator to do) the sheer tonnage of scholarship done on the significance of what Austen leaves out of her novels, taking this part of her letter for a statement of resistance against epistemological comprehensiveness might make a bit more sense. Austen's novels are very particularly about what they're about, and they're very consciously and, I think, comfortably not about everything. That time in the novel's history had passed; one could have one's sensibility without having to make sense of the Siege of Namur, a trip to Europe, a cyclopedia, or a treatise on the importance of names and noses.

Why my prof. didn't seem to think I should make this part of the chapter, I don't know; maybe it's part of the book that comes later. At least for now I have an answer to what she thought would definitely be a question.

Eureka!

2007-12-04T11:58:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry on the reading habits of characters in novels and what I perceived as the unexpected absence of contemporary novels in other contemporary novels. Why hadn't Clarissa read Pamela, I queried; why hadn't Tom Jones read Joseph Andrews? Part of my dissertation is about the temporal organization of literature by genres (how do genres mediate other forms/modes/genres in such a way as to render them obsolete or contribute to their longevity), so I hope I'm appropriately obsessed with what would most simply be called intertextuality. I'm not particularly in interested in the meanings created by such references--if Derrida has taught me anything it's that there's no point chasing down the infinite (or the nothing)--I just want to know what's going on in terms of interpolated literary criticism. What gets noticed, what gets left out.

I have been "reading" Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, the shorter but even less interesting follow-up to Clarissa. The former aspires to even more encyclopedic heights than the latter; SGC's billion or so pages incorporate treatises on education, morality, philosophy, economics, ethics, courtship, and so on; there are whole sections recorded as dialogue, like you'd see in a play, and indeed at the there's a list of dramatis personae (called "Names of the Principal Persons" but I'm not fooled). There are plenty of references to other texts, both well-known and otherwise. The Battle of the Books and Tale of a Tub are mentioned early on; there's an excerpt from Young's Night Thoughts. A Bold Stroke for a Wife gets a mention; Locke is quoted several times. One letter even records a version of that wonderful old poem, "Dr. Fell":

I do not like thee Dr. Fell;
The reason why, I cannot tell--
But I don't like thee, Dr. Fell.

There's more at work here than just the usurpation of the commonplace book by the novel. Richardson is very insistent that all the parts are connected; the narrative systematizes, and literarure is part of the system. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Unsurprisingly, Richardson seems to be continuing his unspoken declaration of damnatio memoriae on the sort-of-novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood. Though their content has been absorbed (amorous intrigue), it's been largely de-fanged and systematized--justified to the ways of Richardson, and no longer of kinship to its mothers (I shall be drawing out the point of the child being of no relation to its mother in the context of genre/generic inheritance when I get to Tristram Shandy). Thus far, Fielding's novels too are nowhere to be found as existing within the diegesis. Richardson, like a good megalomaniac (and not unlike an encyclopedist, I think--your Chambers, your Diderot), wants to define the whole genre and decide what counts as valuable or true and what doesn't.

So imagine my joy--my boundless, sad academic joy!--when I discover, entirely by accident, in the first letter of volume II, the following:
Lord G. appeared to advantage, as Sir Charles managed it, under the awful eye of Miss Grandison. Upon my word, Lucy, she makes very free with him. I whisper'd her, that she did--A very Miss Howe, said I.
To a very Mr. Hickman, re-whispered she. But here's the difference: I am not determined to have Lord G. Miss Howe yielded to her Mother's recommendation, and intended to marry Mr. Hickman, even when she used him worst.

Harriet (the author of the letter) and Lucy (her cousin and friend) have both read Clarissa. Unless I miss my guess--and I have a lot more skimming to do before I can say for sure--Clarissa will be the only novel mentioned in Sir Charles Grandison. What the significance of this is I am not prepared to say. I'm just pleased to have found it.

Go go Gadget book!

2007-11-19T12:32:00.000-05:00

To the right, though it's too small to be viewed here, is the image that greeted me when I logged into Amazon.com today (click the pic for a full-size, readable image). It's a message from Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, the purpose of which is to plug their latest gadget: Kindle, "a wireless portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers."

People have for the most part been rejecting electronic books and reading devices for years, and Bezos seems to know why. While Kindle would pay for itself after about approximately twenty books (figuring an average price of $20 per tome), most people I know would gladly continue to fork over the green (or its virtual equivalent) for the "real" thing--the real thing giving us some undefinable tactile experience that for all I know flips some sort of nostalgia switch in our brains or helps us to disconnect from a world all too cluttered with all too many things that beep or squawk at you when they need recharging. I for one like to nibble absentmindedly on the corners of my books, dog-ear their pages, and utterly ruin them for others with tea-stains, chocolate smudges, and obnoxious marginalia. If I should happen to want to throw the book at something, I am also reassured by the knowledge that it is the target rather than the book that will sustain the most damage in the transfer of energy. Can't go throwing $400 doohickeys about unless you're a celebrity or producer of some sort.

Bezos et al. have been working for three years on this latest attempt to lure us literary luddites away from the pleasures of pulp. He acknowledges the elegance of the physical book in an opening salvo that would have your average materialist pulling out his or her very real hair:

"The physical book is so elegant that the artifact itself disappears into the background. The paper, glue, ink and stitching that make up the book vanish, and what remains is the author's world."

I tend to sneer a bit more than I should at book historians who insist I need to sniff at two centuries' worth of dust and foxing in order to understanding a text, so for the most part I'm prepared to agree that once the act of reading has gotten underway I tend not to consider the binding. I don't think the artifact quite disappears, however, and in his heart of hearts I don't think Bezos does either. What he seems to suggest is the crucial element of the new gizmo is its realistic recreation of the appearance of paper. Not forgetting that reading is a visual business, and well aware that reading Clarissa on a screen would have us looking for even faster means of suicide than hanging, the authors of the Kindle product page write: "Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper."

Looks and reads. I'm not quite sure how to parse that bit of ad-copy--can't quite figure out how you'd get something that looked like real paper but didn't "read" like it--but that's as may be. A Marshall McLuhan fan would definitely like the idea of throwing three years of development into recreating paper: the old technology definitely becomes the content of the new in this scenario. It would seem that in this case the decision is really driven by aesthetics in the pre-nineteenth-century sense of the term. There's something about our sensory interaction with ink and paper that can't be topped by any other graphic representation (perhaps if they can figure out how to "upload" content Matrix-style we'll give up the graphic).

As always, I'm thinking about archives, and it's interesting to me how technodetermined the archive is with a doodad like this one. I don't know how many "classics" of literature will be available; at the moment it seems that you can get any number of magazines and blogs, and almost anything from the NY Times bestseller list. So if you decide that Kindle is how you're going to consume literature, you're really letting the technology determine what you're going to have access to. It's like the "problem" with JSTOR I heard described at a recent job talk--users get the sense that if it's not available electronically, it's not worth reading or simply doesn't exist.

I don't think Kindle is going to have that kind of impact, of course--I'm just theorizing about what it represents in an abstract sense. I'm fairly certain that it's going to be literature's answer to the Segway. Toni Morrison and James Patterson are already shilling for it, if that means anything to you.

There's also something to be said about its offering the availability of a bazillion blogs, magazines, and newspapers as major selling points when no one has ever read blogs on anything but a screen, and when newspaper circulation keeps going down every quarter.

Would you buy one?

Have a Shandean Halloween, everybody!

2007-10-28T23:21:00.000-04:00

Please carve the face of your ideal jack 'o lantern in the space provided.

No Novel Here.

2007-10-24T18:26:00.000-04:00

Others who are smarter and better read will be better able to answer the following question:

Why hasn't Sofia Western read Pamela? or Clarissa?

And this question, too:

Why hasn't Clarissa read Pamela?

Maybe even this question:

Why hasn't Arabella read either?

Or this question:

Why hasn't Miss Betsy Thoughtless read any of 'em?

You might say that just because they don't mention them doesn't mean they haven't read them. I might respond that given their effect on the genre and their involvement in a very presentist discourse about the education and entertainment of young women, they're conspicuously absent. The novel as it came to prominence during the 1740s and 50s seems to be missing from the novels of the 1740s and 50s.

I am the first to admit that I haven't read nearly enough to make this assessment with any certainty. I can say that in what I have read, there seems to be no diegetic cross-referencing--no acknowledgment by characters or narrators of the presence of those novels that were trying to do away with the pernicious novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood (in her 1720s incarnation). It occurs to me that Charlotte Lennox, whose The Female Quixote is specifically and explicitly about what should and should not be read, might have mentioned a contemporary title or two by name. Samuel Johnson thought highly of Lennox; he likewise thought highly of Richardson. Why not plug the latter or offer Clarissa up as an acceptable substitute for all those ridiculous romances buckling the shelves and warping the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them?

The novel, for all its formal realism and pretensions to representing a world sans fairies and dragons, seems to have left itself out of the world it purports to depict. Does anyone out there know offhand when Tom Jones or Clarissa shows up in the library or hands of another character in a novel?

I suppose that each of the novels I have mentioned here set out to redefine the genre, and would therefore not be served by giving free press to a competitor. Perhaps it's simply a function of sustainable fictiveness--it always makes me slightly uncomfortable when characters on TV talk about shows that they watch (I just saw a rerun of the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry is accused of watching Melrose Place and is caught out by a polygraph test). There's something very disconcerting about hearing that theme music within the text of another program. (That's right, I said text. Cut me some slack.)

Maybe it's about elevating the novel in the hierarchy of genres. Novelists are happy to talk about old novels, and they quote freely from plays, poems, sermons, essays, and so on. Interestingly enough, though, even when they do make a reference, it's rarely to a contemporary piece. Pope gets quoted a lot, of course, but by 1749 (Tom Jones) he'd been dead for a few years and in any case most of what gets quoted is from poetry he wrote before 1730. Milton makes his contributions. Dryden was quite popular with Haywood; so was Edmund Waller. All men, and all well and truly dead by 1750. It's possible that the unattributed snippets are contemporary, and there's at least one occasion in MBT when Haywood interpolates a ballad fresh from the street, but the fact that they're given no attribution by the narrator or editor suggests that wherever they came from (unless composed by the author), the weren't thought enough of to find their own ways to fame and fortune.

In any case, I wonder if there's something there about the novel being self-contained, whereas all else is contained by the novel. That'd put it on top as a function of its ability to yoke the rest to its purpose.

Still doesn't really explain why Sofia hasn't read Clarissa.

Gumming up the Works

2007-10-09T17:13:00.000-04:00

In the September 24, 2007 issue of New York Magazine (which I typically thumb through while waiting for the kettle to boil or waiting for The Simpsons to come on), I came across a brief article that rather flipped my switch. Other dissertators I know have spoken of the eerie synchronicity that comes with deep involvement in a project--the sense that somehow everything is relevant, that everything everyone is talking about somehow relates to your own work. Those of you who know me well will know that I already thought everything was about me, dissertation notwithstanding. Nevertheless, even the most hardened amongst you will have to acknowledge the appropriateness of what follows.

Gum, apparently, is proliferating. I've been writing about organizational mechanisms arising subsequent to proliferation, and have even gone so far as to suggest that the rise of the novel is more intimately involved in this than has usually been stipulated. A reading audience with a taste for poems, plays, romances, epics, comedies, treatises, sermons, essays etc. can have their thirsts slaked by the super-enriched vitamin smoothie that the novel becomes over the course of the first half of the 18th century.

But back to the gum.

"It seems that new kinds of chewing gum proliferate daily," Ben Mathis-Lilley writes. "With bodega cash registers now besieged by both the classical brands and tortured-sounding variations thereon. We decided to determine the best of each genre--mint, fruit, and bubblegum--by doing a comprehensive taste test" (62).

If Fielding's comic epic in prose isn't a novelist's answer to Trident Minty Sweet Twist, I don't know what is. The "new" province of writing that he shaped into Tom Jones takes your classic brands (comedy, epic, mint) and combines them with new flavors (realism, moral ambiguity, Sweet Twist). But the point here is that as soon as there is proliferation, or the perception of proliferation (and I have to say I think it was "5" gum that put ME over the top), there follows a need or desire to establish a hierarchy of value. Some critic shows up to read/chew it all up and tell me what I can leave on the shelves with respect to book and gum alike. Wylie Dufresne and Alex Stupak, a chef-proprietor and pastry chef, inform me that in chew-wise the classics are actually the best. So your Iliad is Wrigley's Spearmint and your Margites (if we hadn't lost the thing) would undoubtedly be Bazooka Joe (valued by the critics here for its "classic" flavor).

Between them (both in flavor and on the actual magazine page) in the fruit category is Adams Sour Cherry, which I haven't tried, but which I am nonetheless confident would to an adept synaesthesiac taste like Tom Jones reads.

All other gums--and books--you can discard as being both literally and figuratively beneath your taste.

One Man's Trash

2007-10-08T17:55:00.000-04:00

I had determined to begin my dissertation in earnest today, rather than blogging it a piece at a time in the hopes that each night some little Dissertation-Elves might come and cobble it together whilst I slept. I have written on encyclopedism, novels, Tristram Shandy, Clarissa, Tom Jones, and The Female Quixote; I have engaged Marshall McLuhan on generic mediation and considered the rise or emergence narratives of McKeon, Warner, Hunter, and Watt (for most of these I might as well just have read Reeve's Progress of Romance). I have noted that most leave Tristram out of their theorizations or give it little attention, despite the depth of that work's involvement in novelistic discourse. I have considered the roles of bastardry, inheritance, and gender in the generic formulation and posterity of the novel. And as soon as I opened Word to put virtual pen to paper, I fell subject to the Stooges Syndrome--everything trying to cram its way through the door at once, preventing anything getting through at all. All I have to do is everything; but where do you start a circle?

As if in sympathy with my state, Word began to crash. And crash, and crash, and crash. So while I wait for my computer to slog its way through a complete scan in search of a virus that probably isn't responsible, I thought I'd offer a note on the above--a picture of one volume of an incomplete set of the Complete Works of Charles Dickens that I rescued from the street this weekend. I have recovered fifteen volumes of at least twenty, and though as you can see they're mostly in a fairly sorry state I couldn't bear to see them hauled off to the dust-heap. The set is by Colonial Press, Inc., out of Clinton, Mass., and could be from sixty to more than a hundred years old. Colonial doesn't exist anymore, and their demise largely withered the town of Clinton, but the press was at one point one of the largest on the East Coast and was apparently the first to put the Warren Commission Report into public hands.

I am no Dickens scholar, whatever the MLA might reflect, and if I get a chance to read for pleasure again in my lifetime I'm not sure that Dickens will be the one to whom I look to fill the hours. I understand there were some interesting things written after 1900; I remain skeptical, but I think it might be worth investigating.

The question, then, is why did I bother to dedicate precious shelf-space to approximately 800 cubic inches of tattered Victorian literature that I might never get around to reading? I think it's both because I naturally (by which I mean inexplicably, as opposed to normally) like old books, and know that if I DO ever read them, I won't require the latest greatest aspiring-to-be-definitive editions. I won't require publishing histories, critical essays, or celebratory introductions. I'll just be able to go the shelf and pull down a nice piece of fiction unadulterated by my professional interests and undiminished by what here and there amounts to substantial foxing.

I think that sounds lovely.

Serving up a tasty Cavendish

2007-10-04T21:07:00.000-04:00

Or, that's a fine how-to-ragoo!

I am, as ever, unable to resist doing that for which John Dennis would surely have condemned me. But Pope thought Dennis was a prat, so there's that.

In my futile but ongoing attempt to audit the encyclopedic texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I came across a word with which I unabashedly admit I had hitherto been utterly unfamiliar. Eliza Haywood, in Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) -- a novel which like so many of its mid-century peers is thoroughly involved in encyclopedic discourse -- titles Chapter XVI of the second volume thus: "Is a kind of olio, a mixture of many things, all of them very much to the purpose, though less entertaining than some others."

As Christine Blouch's footnote tells us, an olio is "a hodgepodge of heterogeneous elements." The note is somewhat severally redundant; "hodgepodge" itself refers to a mixture of heterogeneous elements, so indeed the note in itself adds nothing to the chapter title by way of explanation. The interesting part occurs in the etymologies of both olio and hodgepodge. Each comes from the world of food---the former from Spain (ollo), the latter from French (hochepot). This discovery put me in mind of Henry Fielding, who offers up Tom Jones as a "ragoo" of human nature, seasoned with all "the affectation and vice which courts and cities can afford."

So the links between literary variegation and the culinary arts are several. Having left "olio" out of my ESTC searches of "dictionary," "encyclopedia," and the like, I decided to go round once more with "olio," and discovered (as many of you are already undoubtedly aware) that it is Margaret Cavendish who gives us the first recorded use of "olio" to mean a sort of miscellany, or collection of literary pieces. The OED confirms her The Worlds Olio of 1655 as the earliest instance.

Cavendish has in the last few years started to get the attention she deserves, but even Paper Bodies (2000), the excellent Broadview Cavendish reader only offers the preface, and unless one happened to read the thing cover-to-cover one would likely pass over the Olio in favor of the better-known and complete The Blazing World. The entire Olio is available through EEBO, and those of you interested in aesthetics (pre-Romantic), genre studies, or indeed almost any subject under the sun might want to take a look at Cavendish's quasi-encyclopedic treatment. The organization leaves a great deal to be desired in an ease-of-use way, to be sure, but I think through no fault of their own the good people at OED reinforce a mischaracterization of the text. Miscellany an olio may be, and certainly the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of magazine-miscellanies that didn't shy away from advertising themselves as "universal," "compleat," or what have you. But a World's Olio--that to me suggests the foundation of a system, the suggestion that these heterogeneous elements are only heterogeneous in presentation. They are meant to cohere, or at least reflect and reinforce the possibility of coherence. It's a far cry from the encyclopedias of the eighteenth, but I think if they listened closely they might hear Cavendish shouting.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Cavendish's first entries are on fame, and why men write books (a subject to which she gave some attention in The Blazing World. Books, she hopes, will be the paper bodies that extend her life beyond the death of flesh). Here are perhaps my favorite of her words on the subject:

"Fame makes a difference between man and Beast."

"Next, the being born to the glory of God, Man is born to produce a Fame by some particular acts to prove himself a man, unlesse we shall say there is no difference in Nature, between man and beast; For beasts when they are dead, the rest of the beasts retain not their memory from one posterity to another, as we can perceive, and we study the natures of Beasts, and their way so subtilly, as surely we should discover some-what: but the difference betwixt man and beast, to speak naturally, and onely according to her works without any Divine influence, is, that dead men live in living men, where beasts die without Record of beasts; So that those men that die in oblivion, are beasts by nature, for the rational Soul in man is a work of nature, as well as the body, and therefore ought to be taught by nature to be as industrious to get a Fame to live to after Ages, as the body to get food for present life, for as natures principles are created to produced some effects, so the Soul to produce Fame."

Heady stuff. Does this go in my introduction, or my chapter on encyclopedias?

Dissertation Envy

2007-10-03T10:19:00.000-04:00

In the course of preparing for the jungle war that will be the dissertation process, I have come across a fair few examples of the sorts of projects others have done and are doing. They are all more appealing, well-organized, and better thought out than my own. Or so it would seem from the outside.

The structure I have seen for a dissertation and a good number of shorter critical works is thus: introduction, three to five chapters, conclusion, bibliography. Almost without exception, the chapters are 40-70 pages, and each deals with a single author or text. I recently read a dissertation on the "inheritance novel," which makes an argument for establishing that genre using Clarissa, Evelina, and Pride and Prejudice. Another I encountered follows tropes of failed lineal descent through Tale of a Tub, The Dunciad, and Tristram Shandy (these three texts are perhaps too frequently put together, but that's another matter). The pattern repeats in book-length works. Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Stories has six chapters dedicated to Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Delarivier Manley, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth. This, apparently, is how you write a book.

I am having difficulty duplicating this structure in my own work--narrowing down the focus, as it were. For the moment at least I've settled on a breakdown by genre: encyclopedias/dictionaries, poetry, periodicals, novels. I've got a neat little structure there that makes a great deal of sense to me in the abstract. The project is about generic organization of literature with respect to time, or how each genre negotiates its past, present, and future. Encyclopedias, as I will establish in the first chapter, began the century by collecting past knowledge and aspiring to completeness. It ended the century by morphing into a more progressive genre, unable to systematize fully the knowledge of all things and settling into a long life as a research tool. Rather than containing all knowledge, it became about producing more knowledge within disciplines. It's the Britannica I'm speaking of towards the end, and the first edition came out in 1768. The novel, I mean to suggest, underwent largely the same trajectory, so I shall close with Tristram Shandy, a full-on encyclopedic novel more deeply involved in novelistic tradition than is usually appreciated. The last volume of Shandy appeared in 1767, which closes the dissertation into a nice circle in terms of texts and time.

Haven't sorted out the middle, yet.

Encyclopedias are easy. There are a lot of them, but it's easy to talk about the Big Three: Chambers, Diderot, Britannica. Half of this chapter already exists in a term paper waiting to be reworked. Also, they're "closed" units with far fewer and better-defined generic conventions governing their operation. Despite the mind-boggling nature of their stated purpose--collecting and arranging all knowledge--they're quite simple things to think about. Novels, on the other hand, are ridiculously complex beasts, each the spawn of a bastard genre uncertain of its parentage and searching for literary legitimacy. Tristram Shandy is not just encyclopedic the way a novel is encyclopedic, by which I mean capable of containing and mediating and/or remediating all forms of writing. Other novels (Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Clarissa, The Female Quixote, Evelina, Miss Betsy Thoughtless, A Simple Story) traffic in encyclopedic terms, or at least the discourse of completeness, order, epistemological utility. This is intergeneric encyclopedism--a novel, in its post-taxonomic-free-for-all definition, gives you poems, songs, ballads, plays, letters, essays, treatises, sermons, romances, newspapers, magazines, epics, fables, true histories, amatory fiction, didacticism, and so on. They're recognizably present, though fundamentally altered in their synthesis by the novel's fictive status and formal realism. Chivalry isn't dead, it's just been burdened with jointures. Shandy of course takes this to extremes. It has the intergeneric encyclopedism of the novel even as it mocks the claims to characterological and epistemological completeness made so loudly by and by others on behalf of Clarissa, which despite its popularity and number of imitators actually threatened to kill the genre where it stood--a fact reflected, I think, though perhaps not intentionally, by the death of its heroine and the high probability of suicidal tendencies in any of its readers who thought story might count for as much as sentiment. Shandy also, however, has intrageneric encyclopedism. It brings together the entire history of the novel's "rise" by containing and (comically, satirically) abridging the principle concerns of half a century's imaginative prose.

If one wanted to know the history of the novel, one could practically do away with every novel but Tristram Shandy. This is course precisely what Chambers wanted with his Cyclopaedia--to render a great many other books unnecessary. The problem in novelism is that unless you've read a great amount of what Tristram contains and digests, however messily, you wouldn't know it was doing it. To a reader in Sterne's time, though--to an avid devourer of prose fiction--perhaps it was clearer. I certainly like to think it was, because the text is made much richer the more specific its references. The problem I keep running up against in approaching this chapter is how to talk about the nature of Tristram's problematic encyclopedism without becoming problematically encyclopedic myself. To write about Tristram Shandy is to write about a lot of eighteenth-century novels. I'm just not sure for how many or how much of them I have to account.

How do I write about a whole genre in fifty or sixty pages, even if I approach it through one book, when other, better, and smarter dissertators dedicate whole dissertations to single genres, and even then select only three or four works to support their examinations of a single theme?

The Medium is what, now?

2007-09-24T14:38:00.001-04:00

I have read Understanding Media more than once. I consider myself bright--not a genius, certainly, in the solving a Rubik's Cube while blindfolded way--but I like to think I'm somewhere on the right side of the bell curve. Nevertheless, I do not fully understand the distinction, such as there is one, between technology and medium, to say nothing of the distinctions between medium, genre, format, and form. I hereby invite my betters to enlighten me with respect to all things McLuhan.

In the thin tissue of lies that my dissertation proposal is rapidly turning out to have in fact been all along, I wrote a line that has since become a bit of a sliver in my eye: "Following Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, 'old' literary forms became the contents of the 'new' organizational technology called 'the novel.' Rather than read an epic, a comedy, and a romance, for example, one could read Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a 'comic epic-poem in prose.'

Statement of the obvious that it is, I have begun to wonder if I'm not grossly misapplying McLuhan's understanding of media to matters of genre. To allay this fear requires a better understanding of media than I have.

Certainly the novel as it came to be understood in the latter half of the eighteenth-century (at least according to Watt and his ilk)--a realistic middle-class prose narrative, to be reductive about it--behaves and/or causes the sort of behavior attributed to a new technology (I'll overlook for the moment the most obvious of these being "newness" to which the novel repeatedly laid claim). The new realistic novel mediates, as I suggested above, older forms, and as McLuhan says specifically a new medium will always have an old medium for its content. Writing is a new medium that has speech as its content; print is a new medium that has writing as its content. The novel contains (and by containing, changes) the romance, poetry, essays, letters, sermons, what have you. They are mediated by the novel at the same time they constitute it--which is where I run into the perilous form/content quagmire. Is it the content that makes the novel what it is? Or is it something else? Or is content AND something else? And if the novel is a medium having another medium as its content, then what do these other literary forms mediate? How is the romance a medium, when one could argue that it's print that constitutes the medium and content that makes the romance?

Certainly Dr. Johnson seems have fallen into what McLuhan calls the "somnambulism" of the content-worrier; it's the mixture of vice and virtue that bothers him about Tom Jones. To me that reads as a man concerned about a supposedly "neutral" tool fallen into the wrong hands, like General David Sarnoff claiming at the University of Notre Dame that the goodness or badness of a technological instrument depends on the use to which it's put (McLuhan 23). If guns shoot our enemies, they're good. If they shoot our enemies, they're bad. The gun in itself is neither. The novel is out there; Johnson simply wanted Richardson behind the trigger rather than Fielding. If novels present pure pictures of virtue a la Clarissa, they're good. If they portray moral ambiguity a la Tom Jones, they're bad. This interpretation of Johnson's statement could construe "the novel" as a technology used to represent and comprehend the real world. The bigger deal--the medium being the message part of this affair, as the rise-of-the-novel folk might tell you--is that it's the "real" world that's going to be represented, as opposed to some idealized nonsense with noble heroes, mustache-twirling villains, and perhaps the occasional dragon.

I am thinking specifically here of Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), in which the female protagonist, Arabella, is both so comically and frustratingly addled with French romances that they utterly define her reality. The characters around here, with whom the readers are clearly meant to identify, are appropriately befuddled, bemused, or beleaguered by this epistemological and ontological aberration. In technological terms, and borrowing from the lexicon of a medium oft-cited by McLuhan, this could be construed as the difference between black-and-white versus color television. The medium is the same--television--but there's a critical technological development that permits more "realistic" portrayal of an image (setting aside considerations of cinematographic aesthetics, etc.--I'm just trying to draw out a distinction; the analogy breaks down a bit quickly). We are meant to snicker at Arabella, just as we frequently snicker at someone who refuses to live in the now--the "now," as it so often is, being technologically defined. Email, cellphone, computer instead of letter, landline, typewriter. Realistic novel (Female Quixote, Tom Jones, Clarissa) instead of romance. (My friends snicker at me because I still watch television the old way--that is, with commercials--because I don't have TiVo.) The realistic novel is a technological improvement over the romance so long as realism is defined as the desirable quality. It does a better job of representing the "real" world.*

Another way of phrasing the question might be to ask how "technology" can be broken up--are there subtechnologies, the way there are subgenres. Is genre itself a subtechnology? If genre is a way in which we organize information, and if organizing information is fundamental to the self, and if technology is an extension of the self, is not then genre a form of technology? If language is technology, as McLuhan says, and if language organizes (and perhaps restricts) thought (as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis very problematically suggests), then why shouldn't genre be thought of the same way, if our understanding and communication of information is at least in part and perhaps significantly determined by genre conventions? As it was with Arabella until she got some new tools?

Here's another question with respect to language and technology. Language, let us say, is a technology. That's the thing itself--language, the capacity, the organ, the phenomenon, however you think of it. What then, is French, or English, or Latin? Each has its own rules, permits or proscribes different constructions. It's not enough to say that English is a kind of language. Is format the appropriate term? A way to convert data to information for observation and interpretation? Should I be thinking of genre in terms of format, rather than technology?

*It's worth mentioning that there's reason to interpret Arabella's initial technogeneric (you should absolutely throw rotten vegetables at me for that not-long-for-this-world neologism) recalcitrance as ironic. Her memory for the romances she reads is beyond belief, and her deployment of romantic tropes is such that it may be (has to be?) Lennox satirizing via exaggeration the establishment's concern that this is precisely the effect romances and novel-reading would have on young women. If girls really went about thinking that romances were real, they wouldn't last terribly long because we'd lock them up as lunatics. Arabella is ridiculous; we know she's ridiculous, and that ridiculousness is Lennox telling men that whatever the dangers of bad novels and romances might be, women aren't that ridiculous because that kind of ridiculousness just isn't possible.

A Note on the Marbled Page

2007-09-17T11:47:00.000-04:00

Many a critic has spent many a word interpreting the marbled page included in Vol. III, chap xxxvi of Tristam Shandy. Tristram himself calls it "the motley emblem" of his work, and dares the reader to attempt to decipher its meaning. We, being the suckers we are, happily stumble our way through as many readings as there are variations in the page (most of these hinge on the necessary uniqueness of each copy as a result of the impossibility of mass-producing identical marbled pages). And I'm not suggesting we should stop.

In thumbing my way through an ever-increasing pile of 18th century books, however, I noticed that many came with marbled pages when originally printed or reprinted later in the century. The have marbled board-pages, and/or end-pages, as is frequently mentioned the descriptions offered by antiquarian booksellers. I wonder, then, if most of the Shandean critics out there have been missing something by somewhat failing to adequately historicize the marbled page as a regular feature of contemporary bookmaking. I give full marks therefore to Janine Barchas, who reminds us in a parenthetical of from whence Sterne gets the idea (Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 16). Barchas, following Hunter, rightly notes that the marbled page is another deliberately misplaced book element with which contemporary readers would have been quite familiar. The meaning--or a meaning--of the marbled page therefore (as so often happen in TS) requires us to look out from the book in front of us to the entire field of printed literature. Sterne foregrounds the common element by moving it into the body of the text, thus transforming what might hitherto have passed as merely an aesthetic addition into a visual representation of the interpretive indeterminacy to which all books are subject. The device is not new--it's old, and it has simply been used in a new way.

I, of course, would say that the way it's used is after the fashion of an encyclopedia, a statement which way well be off the wall with respect to other novels in the period but which is substantially more appropriate to TS, with its Tristrapedia and almost aggressive generic appropriations. An encyclopedia attempts to explain all knowledge--or at least present it--but in order to do so that knowledge must be broken up and displayed in an artificial and arbitrary fashion. The perfect, unified field is out there for the viewing--we call it the world, the universe, whatever-- and it has its perfect author, God. And as easy at it is to experience the unity (be alive), it's awfully difficult to understand once you start to think about it. The novel, especially in a Tom Jones or Clarissa kind of way, seeks to duplicate or at least approximate that unity. Sterne's marbled page is another encyclopedized (awful neologism, that, I swear I'll never use it again) element strategically placed to demonstrate via its absurdity that the novel cannot duplicate nature because it cannot achieve universality. The universe (thanks largely to Newton's mechanics) works the same for everybody; the laws of gravity apply across all bodies. Novels, the marbled page reminds us, don't.

ESTC, you complete me.

2007-09-15T16:18:00.000-04:00

What on earth, I wonder, took me so long to rediscover the English Short Title Catalogue? Where was my head? It's on-line, free for all to access, and allows the kind of data collection that simply could not be done in an old-timey off-line way. With it one of course runs the risk of becoming a bad statistician, and any conclusions drawn based on findings therein must be heavily qualified; that being said, some of the searches I've conducted have been highly suggestive if not conclusive. Here's a smattering of what I've done in the space of only a few hours:

Search terms: "complete" and "compleat". Exact phrase in title. Any language.

England
Years: # items
1601-1700: 938
1701-1710: 269
1711-1720: 313
1721-1730: 345
1731-1740: 407
1741-1750: 414
1751-1760: 424
1761-1770: 559
1771-1780: 683
1781-1790: 835
1791-1800: 872

England
Years:
1720: 23
1721: 23
1722: 31
1723: 20
1724: 37
1725: 48
1726: 39
1727: 32
1728: 35
1729: 35
1730: 59
1731: 25
1732: 48
1733: 33
1734: 36
1735: 40
1736: 43
1737: 37
1738: 50
1739: 48

Search term: "Dictionary." Exact phrase in title. Any language.

England:

1701-1710: 84
1711-1720: 49
1721-1730: 73
1731-1740: 96
1741-1750: 103
1751-1760: 128
1761-1770: 147
1771-1780: 203
1781-1790: 182
1791-1800: 299

Search Term: "System." Exact word in title. Any language.

England:

1601-1700: 36
1701-1710: 35
1711-1720: 63
1721-1730: 71
1731-1740: 89
1741-1750: 99
1751-1760: 128
1761-1770: 153
1771-1780: 232
1781-1790: 286
1791-1800: 445

(bold indicates largest year-over-year/decade-over-decade number--not %--increase, italics largest decrease)

These numbers will not be exact; though the word may occur in the title, unless one looks through each of them (and we all know what eighteenth-century titles are like--each is in itself near the length of a bible) one won't know precisely how the word is being used. For example, "complete" (or "compleat," which started off the century as the favored spelling but gradually lost ground--it's not until 1761-1770 that there are more "completes" than "compleats") generally refers to one or more of the following:

A "complete" collection of an author's works or a bound volume of periodicals
Complete as in everything-you-need-to-know; the "complete gardener," "farrier," "gamester," etc. Also in "complete system."
Complete histories, whether of individuals, nations, events, or subjects, and often including letters, memoirs, declarations, public decrees, acts of government, etc. As in "A Compleat History of Magick," "A Compleat History of the late War in the Netherlands," etc.
A work including some other complete tool, as in charts, indexes, etc.
Complete as in perfect, or utmost, as in "complete happiness."

The first three are by far the most common, but indicate what to me seem very different qualities of completeness. None, moreover, necessarily guarantees anything of the sort. Setting aside the metaphysical quagmire of the fifth category, let us turn to the others. One could reasonably expect a "complete" collection of Ward's London Spy, for example, which ran for 18 months from 1698-1700, and which was published as an 18 part collection in 1703, to be complete. Nevertheless, the 2nd edition of the collection, published in 1704, is advertised as "much enlarg'd and corrected." Corrected, fine; but enlarged? With what, pray tell? Didn't I buy the complete one? The producers of the Compleat Gardener, likewise, might be happy to add 100 items to its list of herbs from one edition to the next. One might also choose to take issue with the idea that Edward Barnard's New, impartial and complete History of England (covering the period of "earliest authentic information" to 1790) occupies 718 pages in 2⁰, whereas Charles Ashburton's A new and complete History of England (from the first settlement of Brutus to the year 1793) takes up 946 pages, also in 2⁰. Is Ashburton's version of English history somehow 228 pages "more" complete? Some of this is obviously my own naivete; different historians will tell different histories, and perhaps simple word economy could buy one author a couple hundred pages. Seems to me, though, that one man's complete is another's unfinished.

What qualifies an index as complete, by the way, is totally beyond me.

So it would seem that "complete" in the 18th century is somewhat akin to our "All Natural!" Everyone wants it, but it might not mean anything. The numbers of titles including the term in what amounts to a marketing ploy, however, always go up, decade after decade, indicating that (as you'd expect) "completeness," however it was understood, remained a desirable characteristic throughout the century. It is also interesting that the largest jumps in such titles occur from 1760-1790; why then? What was going on in other genres? The epistolary novel, for example, saw a dramatic decline in new titles from 1771-1780, the same decade that saw one of the largest increases in dictionaries, systems, and those miscellaneous genres in which "completeness" could reasonably be advertised ("complete" frequently modified "dictionary" and "system" as well, though one perhaps incorrectly feels that "system" implies completeness--isn't an incomplete system a system that isn't a system?). Perhaps these are related; perhaps not.

What can we conclude, if anything, about the year-over-year changes from 1729-1733? All was holding steady until '29 (a year after Chambers' Cyclopaedia), then in 1730 we have something of a glut. Did booksellers respond by turning down titles over the next year? Did they then think they'd gone too far and respond by jacking up the number again?

I don't wish to fall into the Franco Moretti track of dubious quantification built largely on even more dubious generic classifications (a la Graphs, Maps, and Trees). Taxonomy in the arts, and particularly in the realm of eighteenth-century literature, always seems to end in tears; a picaresque isn't necessarily only a picaresque, and a novel in the later sense of the term could easily incorporate, interpolate, or sublimate what was once understood to be romance or indeed anything else (those of you familiar with my hobbyhorse will know that in my estimation the designation "novel" for much the period is dependent on this ability).

So if one is to use this sort of data, it has to be done carefully. The strange thing seems to me to be how compelling I find it--how willing I am to be convinced by a mere display of numbers. Mary Poovey tells me--or rather, A History of the Modern Fact tells me--that I owe this allegiance to numerical facticity largely to the same period that saw the emergence of the novel (I have ideas about that but they're for another time). There's something very sneaky about literary statistics. 445 items with "system" in the title, with probably just under 400 of them reflecting what I understand a system in the period to be. I run up here against the same old problem--with 445 to look through, in a single decade, and the inability to manage effectively the perhaps over 1000 distinct titles published throughout the century, how can I ever really be sure of what I'm seeing?

Soon--a bit more of the same on the romance and the novel...

Only the penitent man shall dissertate.

2007-09-12T18:23:00.000-04:00

Bless me, Workblog, for I have sinned; it has been three months since my last entry.

These are my sins:

I have failed to adequately explore the ramifications of proliferation on generic hierarchization
I have failed to make absolutely the most of my time in the British Library
I have raised my fist in anger against Michael McKeon (in absentia)
I have lusted after Evelina, Miss Milner, two Matildas, one Melliora and an Arabella.

God grant me the serenity to find the texts that are material to my thesis, the courage to disregard the arguments that are specious, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Much more to follow; time to go round again. Once more unto the breach.

Nostradamus Goes to the Bookshop

2007-06-13T11:53:00.000-04:00

My roommate has a subscription to New York Magazine. In last week's issue (June 4, 2007), following an article entitled "The Best Novels You've Never Read" and preceding one about talent emerging where no one is looking for it, is a one-pager called "The Future Canon." Obviously this piqued my interest a bit. The author, or reporter, or writer, or interviewer, or compiler, or whatever one is when one puts one of these things together apparently went about asking folks which contemporary novels and novelists would be taught in fifty years' time.

Let's pick this apart.

Horace, in the first century BC, writing about the veneration of the past, mockingly posited that one hundred years was the appropriate period a text should have to survive in order to pass the test of time. Pope, in the eighteenth century AD, followed suit. Johnson was aware of the standard, and likewise aware that Pope, like Horace, had scoffed at it. But quantification was all the rage in the later eighteenth, thanks very much Mr. Science, and as Trevor Ross notes in The Making of the English Literary Canon, that gave the number some measure of rhetorical if not practical force (274). Which is not to say Johnson gave it any credit.

I bring this up for no other reason than I found it interesting that fifty is the new hundred, at least according to this article. I quite wonder whether there would have been different answers for different periods. If Atonement, by Ian McEwan (fantastic book, by the way, and certainly very worth teaching), will still be taught in 2057, as Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center asserts, will it have dropped out of favor by 2107? If the interviewer had said two hundred years instead of fifty, would James Shapiro at Columbia have given a name other than J. M. Coetzee's? (I've read Disgrace, but am otherwise unfamiliar.) My gut instinct tells me that these profs would have returned these titles and names regardless of time-frame. I suppose I can see the virtue in a half-century mark, though, as it doesn't seem unfathomably distant--rather like predicting the weather in a week as opposed to a month. There's timely and there's timeless, and the two can but don't have to overlap. It's easier to imagine what will be worth teaching to our grandchildren rather than our great-great-grandchildren, who rather than going to school and being taught literature will likely attend off-world mandatory education centers for maintained intellectual calibration in the name of the Supreme Galactic Imperator (a wholly owned subsidiary of Pharmapepsipetrolon Insurance Co.). But I seem to have digressed.

Fine, fine, let's call it fifty, then, and move on.

I have no way of knowing -- short of asking, which seems unlikely -- how many responses Lori Fradkin of New York Magazine received, and obviously the point of the article was to provide an array of texts rather than a scientifically conducted inquiry into academically-driven canon-formation, but if one did assume that she asked twelve people from twelve universities for exactly one response each, then THAT would be neat, because there's absolutely no consensus. I'd find the whole thing more convincing if five out of twelve had put their bets on the same book. Then fifty years from now we could look back and see who got it right, and if they got it right because they said they would. Let's start running the numbers on the self-fulfilling prophecy of canonicity! But as I said, that might have been the unheeded spirit of the article rather than its practical point, which is self-evidently to introduce a broader number of books to potential readers.

Another interesting thing at work here is the way the question is phrased. Ask what "canonical" means to an author in 1715 and you're approaching the problem from a very different angle than that taken by the article. Religious components aside, the "canon" for much of the eighteenth (to the extent the term was used at all, which is an open question) meant texts read, not texts taught. The first professorship in English Literature didn't come until 1828, though of course texts were "taught" before that. But Fradkin polled university-level profs, so that's what I'm sticking with. I wouldn't disagree that the "canon" now belongs more to academic than popular discourse, but you're asking a very different question when you ponder what will be taught in fifty years rather than what will be read. The argument here is, I guess, about what wouldn't be read without the advantage of being taught. Does Harry Potter need the academy's help to go the distance? What does it say about Andre Aciman (Diana Fuss of Princeton's choice) that he does? The teaching canon is about what those granted the authority to do so determine should be passed on and protected from Oblivion -- whether Oblivion wants it or not. And of course what Oblivion wants changes.

The important thing here is whether or not what of contemporary literature will be read and what will be taught in fifty years amount to the same thing. In fifty, maybe not; in one hundred, maybe. I don't quite know the period of independent discovery. What have I read from the 1940s and 50s that I didn't come by as the result of education? Going back another fifty or so, would I ever have "found" Conrad, Ford, or Joyce? Without the academy, would they have been there to be found?

Here, in case you are wondering, are some of the reasons presented supporting the selections:

According to Prof. Dickstein, "books largely survive because of the quality of their writing, and [Ian McEwan] writes beautifully." Now certainly I'd like to believe this is why books survive, and it has that lovely warm essentialist aesthetic feeling about it, but it seems to be an answer about reading rather than teaching. If beauty is all, or even most, of what it takes, then a beautifully written book wouldn't need people like me to shove it down anyone's throat by way of syllabus. And beauty remains problematically in the eye of the etc.
Diana Fuss offers (as with all the others, undoubtedly in oversimplifying extract courtesy of editorial mandate and/or spatial constraint) that Aciman's place in the future is guaranteed by his adeptness at capturing the nuances of human emotion. There's something pleasantly essentialist about this too--not that I think the nuances of human emotion are likely to change in fifty years (I very quietly don't think they've changed all that much in the last five thousand) , but Pope felt that enough had changed in manners if not in secret souls that Homer had to be substantially fiddled with to make him time-and-nation-appropriate. That's a much longer period than fifty years, but hey, in this age of half-hour news cycles and interwebbification, who knows.
Stephanie Li, of the University of Rochester, went the Wordsworthian route. She chose Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt, which I've never heard of and which in any case was "not reviewed very well." It will be taught in fifty years, she thinks, because it will take that long for the academy to find it again. If not ahead of its time, the novel is certainly not in its time, so it'll simply have to wait. Wordsworth wrote as much about his own poetry at the close of the eighteenth. Except, of course, rather than having a misplaced sense of humor like Whitehead, Wordsworth had none at all.
Andre Aciman, the adept nuance-capturer, chose Austerlitz. Aciman's reasoning is perhaps the most relevant to my line of inquiry. The survival of this novel, he claims, is attached to a generic shift yet to be undergone by Holocaust memoirs. Fifty years will make historical documents out of the memoirs and alter their place in the generic hierarchy. "The high literature," Aciman writes, "will migrate to books like Austerlitz." I would have thought Austerlitz would migrate to high literature out of whatever category it currently occupies, but what we have here is a potential flaw in my perspective. Is it the texts that define the category, or the category that defines the texts? Austerlitz will have been around for fifty years--so in that respect it will have been around longer than however high literature is synchronically constituted. High literature would therefore of necessity have to come to Austerlitz. But of course, Austerlitz will have been around for fifty years outside a diachronic category of high literature. So of necessity it would have to enter that category.
The best answer, or at least the most honest, is given by NYU's own Dean Catharine Stimpson, who after naming Jhumpa Lahiri and offering some notes in praise thereof, concludes thus: "if anybody thinks they know how canons are going to be formed, they are guilty of hubris bordering on stupidity."

I rather think she would not have approved my dissertation proposal.

Robo-Fezziwigs will kill us all

2007-06-08T16:23:00.000-04:00

Because it cannot possibly have gotten enough press--no amount of press being sufficient--I have decided to call your attention to Dickens World, a theme park dedicated to the works and times of Charles Dickens. Open as of May 25, 2007, the complex is situated in Chatham, in which place young Charles spent the bulk of his youth. I will leave it to you to hunt out most of the details, but suffice to say it seems few if any of the 62 million pounds spent building the thing went to web design (I have many questions, but if any of them are Frequently Asked I'll never know because I inexplicably lack the authorization necessary to access that page. Someone is also operating an equally under-informative blog). The complex apparently comes complete with a boat ride, recreations of Victorian London, and the very latest in animatronics.

At any rate, I'm sure the Powers That Spend have thoroughly considered the commercial viability of such an enterprise, and I suppose it thrills me to hear that they expect 300,000 visitors per year. We poor Americans have neither an equivalent site nor, I imagine, a quite-equivalent author; I'm no nineteenth-century scholar, and I'm certainly no Americanist, but I shouldn't have to be either to figure out who a US counterpart might be. Poe, I might argue, has the most merchandise attached to his name and literary corpus--I don't think any other poet-prose writers can boast the homage of both a sports franchise and a spot on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's--but I imagine if we were to open any kind of public site of entertainment dedicated to his life and times it would have to be a well-stocked bar in the poorly-lit cellar of a crumbling sanitarium somewhere between New York and Baltimore. Hardly seems family-friendly. So--any suggestions? Who would you build an indoor theme-park for?

I'm having trouble figuring out precisely who these 300,000 people are. If they opened a Harry Potter theme park (they are), I could see it being thronged by millions. If they opened a Lord of the Rings park (they could) I'm sure it would do business as well. But Dickens? One supposes that Chatham needs revenue, and unfortunately for it, Shakespeare belongs to Stratford. Despite my love of a good boat ride and ever-present desire to see robots in period clothing go absolutely berserk in an enclosed space, I don't know that I'd find the hour it takes to get there from London and the four hours it takes to take it all in. And I consider myself a Dickens fan. I've read A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Pickwick Papers, and Bleak House. I've even had an article published on Our Mutual Friend. So if I'm not going to go, who is?

People with children, you answer, and you must be correct. Not having any, and being of a singularly non-nurturing disposition, I take the wrong approach to this concept. Everyone loves the ghosts of Christmas Past through Yet-to-Come, and you needn't be halfway through a PhD to get a minor kick out of watching Marley rattle his chains. But is there really enough of a Dickens fan-base to make The Olde Curiosity Shoppe exhibit worth seeing? Or rather, as Dr. Johnson might have said, worth going to see? And does that fan-base come equipped with children of the right age? I suppose one might organize school-trips as well. In any case, as I said, I'm sure the planners and whatnot have sorted this all out. Nevertheless, I remain skeptical.

But the reason I decided to comment on this at all is because the attraction puts me in mind of a book I quite liked, and which I might like to recommend. I haven't read much of Julian Barnes' work (I'm waiting for a spell in which to read Foucault's Parrot), but if you are possessed of a cynical outlook and snarky sense of humor you could do worse than to read his England, England, which very broadly is about the reduction of all England to a theme-park attraction of itself located on the Isle of Wight.

INXS

2007-05-30T15:29:00.000-04:00

First of all, many thanks to Alice for the free press. Her recent entry is the first (and possibly last) demonstration of the relevance of what I'm working on to someone who is neither me nor has been dead for more than two centuries. Generally speaking I prefer a late audience, as I, like so many others, am in the habit of taking by one's silence that he or she agrees; but, as the living go, she is absolutely aces.

Secondly, why have I titled this entry after an Australian rock band that will this very summer be celebrating its twentieth anniversary? For a number of reasons:

I am following Alice's use of the word "excess" in her title
The band has shown durability beyond both my hopes and expectations and done so in the cyclical fashion enjoyed by many the canonical text
The name of said band gets at one of my hobbyhorses--it eliminates "excess" information: that is, a space between words, two "e's", a "c", and an "s".
I am hopelessly ridiculous.

In reading Alice's post and learning of Gordon Bell's digitally archiving what anyone but the most dedicated voyeur, narcissist, or future anthropologist would likely discard as the excruciating minutiae of a life that had better turn out to be remarkable for more than having digitally archived what anyone but the most dedicated voyeur, narcissist, or future anthropologist...

I'll start again.

It's interesting that Bell is recording everything in a digital archive, as digital technology is precisely that upon which all the archivists whose works I've read suggest an archivist should not rely. It is not, to deploy what I have recently discovered is not "my" buzzword, durable. If you want a durable medium, you're still far better off with analogs--stone, metal, quality paper, etc. If you have anything that's important to you on a 5 1/4 floppy, you know what I'm talking about. I haven't read the Bell (and I don't mean to disparage his character at all; I agree with Alice that he's up to something terribly interesting), so I'm sure he's aware of this.

It does bring up an interesting part of the technology tradeoff, which until I'm better educated I'm going to think about in spatial and temporal terms. Scanning, photodocumenting, etc. -- anything that eliminates the middlemen of analog conservation processes -- enables closer-to-comprehensive documentation by saving both time and space. Space is the easy part. The problem with analog storage is of course that it takes up so much damn real estate. Bell can only do what he's doing because he doesn't have to buy a small moon on which to keep everything he wishes to preserve. As Gabriel Naudé lamented in the seventeenth century, comprehensive knowledge is impossible with respect to space because comprehensive data storage and therefore retrieval are impossible. Or, as comedian Steven Wright put it, "you can't have everything. Where would you put it?" The selection process of survival and canonicity, a librarian will tell you, or might have formerly told you, is driven as much by space as anything else. One wonders to what extent matters of taste came to prominence precisely because proliferation put space at a premium and demanded more stringent and nigh-on metaphysical standards of valuation. "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed" is nothing if not quantity reduced to quality. The best expression can stand in for (take the space of) the countless iterations of something clogging up everyone's brains and bookshelves. (The entry on "memory," included in the treatise on metaphysics in the first edition Encyclopedia Britannica (1768-1771) and culled -- in another space-saving gesture -- from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding uses spatial metaphors such as "storehouse" and "repository" to describe the memory. We're hardly out of the habit.) Now, of course, all we have to do is define "best." Plenty of people around willing to do that.

So, the gizmodification of the world buys us space. The library without walls envisioned by frustrated Enlightenment types can finally exist; total storage and total retrieval are theoretically possible; we can put everything everywhere (of course, this doesn't mean that we can just get rid of the analog "originals." Book historians now weep over the countless manuscripts cast aside when their contents were brought out in print, and as this article suggests, space remains a huge problem. Also interesting and having to do with space, storage, and digital technology is this article).

Tech also buys you time, but the relationship of proliferation to time is a bit more complicated. The proliferation of print is indeed all about time--as Polydore Vergil wrote in 1499 (and as Thomas Langley translated half a century or so later): "one man may print more in one day, than many men in many years could write." You're going to run out of space one way or another, but with high rates of production and increased distribution you're going to run out of more space faster. So in that respect time is the primary concern, but the advantage of speed was one of the most highly praised with respect to the printing press. I'm guessing that it's similarly the temporal advantage of technology even more than the storage concern that makes Bell's project feasible. You certainly can't write to the moment, as Tristram Shandy laments (Fielding's take on this in Shamela is, by the way, one of my favorite things in literature), but with the right gadgets you could perhaps nearly digitize to the moment -- one man may scan more in a day, etc. This I think is the point of Twitter. Limiting the time it takes to make a record (twitter restricts you to 140 characters per message) makes it possible to make more records. As one friend tells me, you send these little missives "all day long." Assuming you can find the right medium between doing things and recording things done, you've got a much more detailed picture of a life to be viewed by you and your posterity at some point down the line.

Or do you? Do 100 140-character notes add up to one 1400-word document? If we don't know what you thought of that bottle of Romanee Conti the label of which you've scanned, or that you barely had space enough to tell us you drank, we might think the more important part of your history has been left out. How do we define ephemera? Dictionaries define it as referring to written or printed documents intended to have a brief lifetime (remarkable how long the concept of "life" has been wrapped up in that of writing. Writing doesn't just exist, or remain--it lives). Ephemera is something you read, and immediately discard. So are my friends' 140-character messages ephemera? What happens to them if I keep them, collect them, string them together, reconstitute them as some sort of narrative? Are they still ephemera? In choosing to record a life 140 characters at a time rather than burden yourself or your friends with "long" entries, could you end up producing an ephemeral 140,000 word document?

What's happened here is an important switch in perspective. So far I've been mostly writing about production. The other side of that coin is of course consumption, and it's on this side that the temporal and spatial advantages of technology meet the limitations of being human. Technology may have allowed you to record twenty years of minutiae and given you a convenient way of carrying it about, but it hasn't given me twenty extra years in which to review it. And if Monsieur Naudé had managed to secure, oh, let's say the entire Left Bank for his Master Library I'm not entirely sure how much time he'd have left to poke about in it. I've written about this problem before -- you can't read everything, and depending on why you're reading, it's possible that you oughtn't to read too much in the first place. Technology doesn't buy the consumer more time; rather, in the context of an increasing and increasingly available body of knowledge contained in print, it makes the same amount of time "worth" less. It's all perfectly well and good if a couple of friends want to send me or make otherwise available ten, twenty, thirty messages a day. I'll be very up-to-date. But if five friends do the same, one wonders if it will start being more trouble than it's worth. And if ten friends do the same, that gives me up to 300 X 140 characters, or 42,000 characters, to read per day. That's just under 30 double-spaced pages of notes. Thank God I'm antisocial. Even so, I can imagine that with much material, I would find myself making decisions about my friends that I would otherwise not have made. "Terribly sorry, old man, but I simply haven't time for any more friends than I can read on the subway. I'm afraid you shall either have to start doing more interesting things with your life, edit yourself down to a reasonable amount, or shove off."

I'm fairly certain that these were roughly the same options readers and/or booksellers gave authors in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Welcome my friends to the show that never ends.

So--on the production side, tech buys time and space. On the consumption side, it makes the process of selection ever more narrowing, and time matters more when space matters less. The only way to combat the time problem caused by proliferation in the absence of spacial inhibitors is a new line in research--a method of knowledge production that reduces time spent in consuming. Though this of course presumes that you're interesting in knowing everything. Or aspiring to knowing everything. Or deluding yourself into thinking you can aspire to know everything. But then, that's what Enlightenment is all about -- with one important distinction. Enlightenment was always about the future. All the mysteries would not be solved in a single lifetime. It would take an untold number to map the mind of the God through the close examination of his works. That meant handing things down, passing them along, securing some sort of continuity that would enable posterity to both understand and carry on the work.

This is why the encyclopedists -- Chambers, at least -- imagined the Cyclopaedia as that work with which humanity could start over if all other works were destroyed. Not start over in a complete sense, of course, but start over from where it left off: in the midst of Enlightenment. So, if you had to save one thing from a world on fire...

Hm. Speaking of proliferation and reduction, this entry has had too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Anything to avoid real work.

Damnatio Memoriae

2007-05-24T22:25:00.000-04:00

Something has to stand in for the other side of immortality, and not surprisingly, the Romans had both a name and a plan for it. Obviously, eradicating every image on a coin, in a painting, or on a statue, and every name scratched onto papyrus or into stone requires some serious overtime and a fairly good idea of where you've left everything you want destroyed. We know (and when I say we I suppose I mean modernity) that when ordered it didn't quite have the desired effect. I imagine a certain degree of notoriety -- or prestige, depending on which side you're on -- must attach itself to being enough of a nuisance to warrant an emperor or senate trying to erase you from history. We certainly seem to remember the few who earned the distinction. I suspect the ordering authorities would lack the sense of humor required to appreciate the irony.

"Damnatio Memoriae" is therefore largely a symbolic gesture of a mangitude that has all but gone out of the universe. This is not to suggest that I would want to inhabit one wherein governmental bodies could still get away with ordering that sort of thing. It's terrifying fascist, calling to mind the Nazis with their book-burning and Orwell's vaporization of unpersons in 1984. Nevertheless, the Roman incarnation has an epic feel to it that for some odd reason appeals to me.

At any rate, my recent encounters with matters of posterity, durable storage media, and the digitization of the archive as a repetition of the manuscript-to-print transition that took place in Europe after Gutenberg got me thinking about what I'd call the pocket-veto version of Damnatio Memoriae. Choosing not to transfer, transmit, or maintain some part of the past is a passive act of damnation. I shy away from introducing the personal to this forum, but my recent photography recovery initiatives and a week's worth of spring cleaning and clutter consolidation have forced me to think fifty years down the line. I have chucked out a few bits and pieces this time around that I had held onto for years with the express intent of periodically revisiting. In discarding the odd keepsake I was very much aware of Damnatio Memoriae. Understanding that I could not rely on my memory to remember what I was throwing away, I began to wonder about what I had already forgotten. What of my own past did I banish from future recollection? Was there anything at all? To what extent is my memory really attached to material cues? To what extent will it be as I get older and there's more to remember (and/or forget)?

From the early years of print and on into the eighteenth century, philosophers, scholars, and other like curmudgeons fretted what they perceived as the deleterious effects of books on memory. Because I have been ruined by popular culture, I turn to movies for an example. From Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

Henry Jones: I found the clues that will safely take us through, in the Chronicles of St. Anselm.
Indiana Jones: What are they?
Henry Jones: (silence)
Indiana Jones: Can't you remember?
Henry Jones: I wrote them down in my diary so I wouldn't have to remember.

Which line rather says it all. I am no cognitive scientist, so I don't know what effects writing and the print revolution really had on human memory capacities or operations. But it does seem to me that by not writing something down I am ultimately condemning it to oblivion. I am compulsive hoarder of correspondence, but no diarist, which will at some point in the future give me a very odd sense of a life defined by other people's sentiments. Already I have had noticed that by reading old letters my life seems longer, a phenomenon I hope will offer some comfort when little of it remains. It's all written down; I'll remember it later. One can see why "writing to the moment" perhaps meant something quite different for Sterne than it did for Richardson; the latter was providing "complete" documentary evidence; the former was trying to stall death.

Every time you throw out a postcard, a birthday missive, etc., you are effectively committing an act of Damnatio Memoriae, but rather than just obliterating someone else from the record you are also destroying a part of yourself in the eyes of the version of you yet to come. People burn photographs, throw away correspondence, return gifts at the end of relationships. In reordering my bookshelves I came across some junior-high era yearbooks, and flipping through them I found several photos of people along with their names marked over with black magic marker. Clearly, some of the old ceremoniousness has come down to us from antiquity. And it completely worked; I couldn't make out who they were, nor why I blacked them out. Though nearly twenty years on, I rather wish I could remember what had obviously been big enough a part of my life to warrant the treatment.

Each of us is to some extent our own posterity; we leave things behind at every age for rediscovery. Should you edit as you write, or not?

There's what we know, there's what we don't know...

2007-05-22T20:11:00.000-04:00

~or, Sometimes you write your dissertation with the body of knowledge you have, not the body of knowledge you want.

I have started the real research phase of the dissertation, and I don't know about you but for me that means picking a secondary source almost at random and hoping it points me in the right direction. There are a series of questions I'd like answered, and at this point it's as though I'm just issuing subpoenas to everyone in the field of English literature in order to define the scope of the inquiry. I'm not entirely certain what's out there. So far, I've seen my buzzwords in quite a few places, but they're being deployed without, I think, careful attention, and no one I've yet read (SO early to say this with confidence) has yet referred to "durability" in quite the way I think they need to. This gives me hope.

First things first: if you're in this field, you should read David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery's The Book History Reader. The 2nd edition is available new in paperback for under $50. It's simply no longer reasonable to participate in literary studies without at least a smattering of book history. As always, I'm coming a bit late to the game, and while I've read a number of the works excerpted in the reader, I have also encountered a number of perspectives hitherto unfamiliar to me. As an eighteenth-century person, I've also gotten into the bad habit of undervaluing periods not my own, which has left me a bit ignorant regarding manuscript production and oral culture. This in turn has left me unable to appreciate fully the impact of print, which has in turn left me a blithering idiot. Thus do I blither on, but to a lesser extent for the survey this book provides.

I was struck today by what I'm calling the Myth of Knowledge until someone tells me what proper scholars call it. The shorthand for it is my frustration at not being able to know everything, and the suspicion that short of my possessing total knowledge, I'm really just making things up. In reading Elizabeth Eisenstein's important The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, I was uncomfortable with what I perceived as a number of abstractions and assessments supported by individual examples. I don't accuse her of shoddy scholarship--leagues and leagues from that; honestly, it's quite the book. But I began to wonder at what point it is -- how much knowledge we have to possess -- in order to draw a conclusion.

For example: say I'm writing about the usage of a particular term in a given period. The word "widget" is used in this context, in these genres, to mean this, applied to that, etc. In how many texts does it have to occur before I can fairly assess what was at work? If I find it in 1000 texts, and there are 10,0000 to look through, is that enough? What if there are 100,000 texts to search? As if I could ever look through that many? If I don't discover the term and what I think is a telling usage in 51% of extant works from the period, am I not fooling myself? And what happens when I discover the single example of a text in which the term is used in a way that does not come into general use for another century? Just because one guy thought about the same thing a bit differently than everyone else, to what extent is my argument unraveled? What is the value of the individual counterexample?

And here's another question, which stems from D. F. McKenzie's reading of the punctuation in the epigraph opening Congreve's authorized version of "The Way of the World" (1710). He compares it to a slight misquotation of the epigraph by Wimsatt and Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy." A comma here, a comma there, and you get a whole different interpretation. I'm reminded here of an episode of The West Wing, in which Toby discovers a potential typo in the U.S. Constitution. Could be a comma, could be a smudge; if a comma, a substantive difference results. If a smudge, a smudge. Now then. To understand Congreve, I have to understand his times, what it meant to write, what it meant to write as a dramatist, what it meant to bring out a version of your play in print or manuscript, and therefore what the differences between print and manuscript were, how those differences affected his position as author and playwright, and so on and so forth. One must historicize. What did it mean to "toil" in 1710? What connotations did the word "wrought" carry? And once I know that, can I even be certain that punctuation worked the same way in the early 18th century? McKenzie suggests that the commas isolate and emphasize a particular phrase. I think he's probably correct, and I don't mean to challenge him on this particular point. Rather, I'm using it as an example to demonstrate the impossible depth and breadth of knowledge required to understand what we might think of as the simplest thing about a text. Commas probably did serve the same function as they do now, though based on some of my students' writing, there's no reason to think that the use of the comma and other syntactical devices hasn't changed dramatically over the years. (Some of my students seem to just write a paper and then sprinkle punctuation marks over it like glitter. But that's for a different day.)

Texts, like people, emerge out of ridiculously complex systems that are scarcely understood in their own times much less hundreds or thousands of years later. If I don't fully comprehend everything that went in to the creation of a text, how can I make an argument about it that isn't some discrediting percentage of rubbish? I'm trying to recreate dinosaurs and I have to use frog DNA to fill in the gaps. We all know what happens when you do that. Raptors try to eat you.

Which brings me to yet another problem I've had with some of the criticism I've been reading. These very clever fellows go back and do the research and present pictures of the past that are utterly contradictory. That's fine, you say; that's the nature of the beast. Some people are going to claim that the printing press was better than scribal culture because it cut down on errors and texts didn't have to get more and more out of whack with every generation. Others are going to remind you that a shoddy printer who was in it for the money would have made things worse precisely because he could work faster without carefully checking his work. That's how you get your "Wicked Bible" of 1631. Sheesh, says the poor printer, you leave one "not" out of the seventh commandment, and everyone goes nuts. (The following lovely moment occurs in Walter Ong's contribution to the Book History Reader: a paragraph ends with, "The printing press simply represented a handy means of multiplying indispensable texts even more rapidly and accurately than was possible under the pecia system." Three sentences later, we get: "more than 2,000 copies of Aristotle's works have come down to us from the and 14th centuries" (151). Accuracy, ha!) But fair enough; different research turns out different results, that's no problem. What we're going to discover is that everything was far more complicated, that everything was going on at once, and that unless you do read everything you can you're going to leave out some nuance, some exception, some thing or other that would have given you "truth" at the expense of clarity.

And this is not to mention the somewhat disturbing tendency a few of these scholars have to treat what they have found in history as though it were available to those alive at the time. Did Pope have the understanding of literacy rates and manuscript v. print production that we have now? I sincerely doubt it. In order to better understand the system of literature at any given period, I should think we'd have to synthesize what was with what was perceived. To which side of the equation you give more weight depends, I suppose, on the sort of work you're trying to write. I scarcely understand how one can write anything that doesn't need to wrangle with both, particularly in the eighteenth century, which I associate with almost staggering self-awareness. There is a system; there are agents within it that can, at best, merely think they know that system. Mmm, dense!

I imagine that those outside the humanities must look at these problems and wonder what on earth we imagine to be the point of these tomes we write -- these theories we offer that can never amount to much more than hopeful essays and well-intentioned approximations. If we're not going to get at the thing as it is, I wonder if we shouldn't construct from the pieces of history whatever we think is useful to us now and for the futures we wish to design. Or more properly, because we already do this by default, why we shouldn't do it without hiding behind the skirts of science. I suppose, though, that that way lies a kind of fascism.

Or Enlightenment.

*addendum
In thinking more about this, as I will, I think a large part of the question is weighing the benefits of sampling against those of an actual census. We're fine with polling data, too, but I don't think anyone would want an election decided by it. If you want real credibility you have to count the votes. Most of them, anyway.

Conversion Factors

2007-05-10T18:32:00.001-04:00

Shambles
Originally uploaded by Scriblerus.

I recently asked a professor of mine if she or indeed anyone else knew roughly what percentage of texts existing in manuscript form were brought out in print when the technology became available, or fiscally reasonable to use. She said that she did not, and that if anyone did, she was unaware of it, and that it seemed unlikely to her as no one really knows for sure what is out there in manuscript anyway. I'm interested in this for reasons related to my dissertation, of course--it seems to me that print technology might have blown a large hole in the future of manuscript texts by semi-permanently consigning them to obsolescence. If it doesn't come out in print when print is the proliferating technology, it must have been deemed unprofitable or unimportant (to the extent that those are separate categories).

This scenario has plenty of modern corollaries. My father has the Beatles' Rubber Soul on vinyl, cassette, CD, and mp3. If the powers that be had at some point decided not to "convert" the old version to the new technology, would it simply have vanished? Or just held out until the last of the record players failed for want of a qualified technician?

The digitization of the archive is the current iteration of this problematic. What gets scanned in v. what does not, or, if we've decided that we're going to go all the way with it, we still have to deal with the order in which things get scanned. If it ain't online RIGHT NOW, it might as well not exist, right? I'm not going to go get it, wherever the hell it is, assuming that it's even out there to be had, which we might not know for certain anyway. So what's the Rubber Soul of the literary past? Who exactly is making the decisions about what's important enough to make available now, versus what will be made available in a year, or two, or whenever they get around to it? Talk about your temporal hierarchization (which phrase, if not yet copyrighted, consider copyrighted). This was the subject of an article in the New York Times on March 11: "History, Digitized (and Abridged)." According to the Library of Congress, the article says, "perhaps only 10 percent of the 132 million objects held will be digitized in the foreseeable future" (sec 3, pg 8).

My dissertation buzzword appears in this article: "'It takes a special skill to select standalone collections that have a durable appeal in the marketplace of scholars," says Donald J. Waters, program officer for scholarly communication at the Mellon Foundation (emphasis mine). Durability here is a quality assigned to the material itself more than to the marketplace audience, which I think is a terribly interesting construction. Indeed, it's the one I'm writing about in the eighteenth century. The material and marketplace, of course, affect and define each other. So how does one define the marketplace in order to render what does the defining durable?

I bring this up today because I just spent a couple of hours sorting through old photos and selecting a few to digitize. In doing so, I think I experienced in miniature a taste of this process. I have a couple of thousand photos around here, culled down over the years from a few thousand more. They were good enough to keep; however, nowhere near that amount were worthy of conversion from analog to digital. A lot of factors went into the decision-making process. I was choosing largely for public access--to post them to flickr.com. Public consumption dictated a selection process based on however I arbitrarily defined "quality"--what would have a durable appeal to the marketplace. Then I had to consider how much memory space I have, how much time it would take, etc. I have done a photo-mining exercise before; several of the photos I scanned this time were set aside several times before. I'm not at all sure what determined why I ignored them before, or why I decided this time around that they were good enough to make the cut. Some were just awful: out of focus, bad composition, bad exposure. Other were quite good, but couldn't be posted for reasons of privacy; I don't like my face being splashed around cyberspace, and I presume several of my friends don't either. I have a few photos that I think are quite beautiful, taken in places and with people during events that profoundly affected my life; but they will not be digitized precisely because those moments are so utterly past as to be potentially problematic if allowed to resurface even before those who were principle participants. There is more than the mere record of my experiences to consider when choosing what parts of that record to present.

Obviously, this last section is personal, and not strictly like to that of the digitization of textual archives around the world. But, I am considering what would happen in the future, if nothing but the digital domain made it to posterity. As a scholar of a future age, I would assume that that which I have received in the most direct form was that which a prior age deemed most worth transmitting. Or, failing that assumption (which I imagine would make me a poor scholar), I would be frustrated by the knowledge that perhaps what was truly most important to the lives of those whom I am studying was specifically left out because it was most important.

Which brings me back to the archive, and the transfer of manuscript to print. And the transfer of manuscript and print to digital. And in fact, the transfer of orature to literature. In any case, all of this has been written about by much smarter people than me; I was simply struck today by my reliving a part of the experience with respect to my own little archive.

Scriblerus Detecting Agency

2007-05-03T22:21:00.000-04:00

My dissertation, as I have now severally said, will explore the problematic of posterity in British Literature of the long eighteenth-century. While life-in-and-after-text has been the concern of authors for millenia, the futurity of writing changed under the pressure of print proliferation in this period. Print widens an author's reachable audience, allows mass production, etc. Do that for enough people and the promise of print is undercut by an unfortunate (from the perspective of the egomaniac) democratization. So how the hell do you manage to get to the top of the field? That's really the question I'm setting out to answer. I imagine you do a number of things. Trod on other authors. Offer more bang for the buck. Create hierarchies based on taste, or wealth, or morals. But you've heard all this before.

In my attempting to put forth an argument, I have apparently skewed too far towards the System. I have cowered behind emergences and mechanisms. Genres emerged to do this or that; some could or couldn't; some lasted or didn't. Where, a couple of my professors asked, is the human agency? You can't simply go around barking about how this or that occurred, because, as one rather poignantly put it, you end up with a dissertation written entirely in passive constructions. Everything is acted upon and nothing (or no one) acts. And this won't win you any friends at parties.

I never intended to leave out the human element. Despite the influence from certain quarters that would have had me taking the human out of the humanities, I never imagined ceding that ground. When we say human, of course, I think what we usually mean is "unpredictable." Samuel Johnson manages to get himself into a position to make pronouncements about the quality of literature. Who on earth could know what he would say? How does the system account for that? The Licensing Act drives Fielding from the stage, so he takes up novel writing. Who's to say he couldn't have gone to law school, like a normal person? If the human didn't matter, then you'd have to conclude that even without Fielding Tom Jones, or something very much like it, would have been written anyway, and done the same work. And to some extent, this is what Foucault has been said to have said. Though I think his position on the matter has been largely overstated.

So I have encountered skepticism in one person, bewilderment in another, and encouragement in the last. And here's me thinking about law school.

Genre is where agency meets system. It's the mediator between the forces at work and the worked upon; it is also what enables the worked upon to work upon the forces at work. The power flows both ways through the gate. This, as I understand it, is feedback. So what I want to do is figure out is the role of genre in organizing literature with respect to time. And when I say genre, I do it with the understanding that human agency is implicit. How do you tweak the genre you've chosen to position yourself at the top of the temporal hierarchy? Ensure you'll reach the future? And how do those genres become durable in themselves? Do genres become disciplines? I think they do. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows.

I have felt utterly stupid now for a year.

Sapere Aude!

2007-04-22T10:09:00.000-04:00

Today in 1707 and 1724, Henry Fielding and Immanuel Kant were born, respectively. I trust you are holding the appropriate celebrations. I, to honor the former, shall embrace the mixed quality of my moral character by robbing a charity to start another charity. In recognition of the latter, I shall calculate the exact value of the mathematical sublime.

In truth, I am thinking less about Fielding than Kant today, as I near the deadline for turning in my dissertation proposal. In speaking to two of my panel members who occupy quite opposite sides of the spectrum with respect to the beast, I was directed, broadly speaking, to make a choice between being the tip of the sword or its pommel. Do you want to run first into a new disciplinary future, though at the risk of being parried or broken off entirely? Or do you wish to write a reliable but fairly blunt instrument that distantly trails the leading edge?

One of them told me, as I dithered between these positions, to "write the dissertation you want to write." So I come back to Kant, who famously described Enlightenment thus:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from self-imposed immaturity for which he himself was responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere Aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.
~ from "What is Enlightenment" (1784)

I begin to understand that while you get the most formal direction during your dissertation--after all, you have a dissertation director--it is also the first real step towards maturity.

Why then, do I want to curl up with a stuffed animal and watch cartoons all day?

Fractal Geometry and the Progress of Enlightenment

2007-04-10T23:14:00.000-04:00

I was talking with a colleague today about the digitization of the archive. This is a fairly hot topic right now, and it's in the subtext of my still flailing dissertation proposal, but I thought I'd take a few minutes to express my thoughts on the subject.

As I have previously articulated, the progress of Enlightenment in the 18th century depended on a process of systematic reduction of an archive still in the making. Too much knowledge becomes as much an obstacle to Enlightenment as too little; as that which is discovered and set down proliferates, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend into Enlightenment's supposed epistemological endpoint: a System of the World. You just can't account for everything. The system, I'm suggesting, answered this problem with the emergence and proliferation of reducing mechanisms and an organizational hierarchy: the encyclopedia, the anthology, the novel, literary criticism. These became principal (but not exclusive) tools of temporal hiearchization; they separated that which was worth keeping from that which was not, and transmitted it to the present and future. Of course, it wasn't "pure" in the sense of a closed system. Cultural values determined standards of originality and "taste"; copyright law and taxes met with the marketplace and caused tremors. There was plenty that got in wrapped up into the system apart from the mere proliferation of texts.

Nevertheless, the technology made it so that some rubric of temporal hierarchization had to be in place. You couldn't keep all the books in one place; you couldn't figure out everything that was there to be kept; things rotted and fell apart. Choices had to be made; knowledge had to be reduced and contained whether materially or conceptually. Whether it goes to a "good" place or not, any "progress" would seem to depend on leaving some things behind.

The counterargument, of course, must involve the fact that societies change; values change; and what was left behind before might be more useful now. The eighteenth century, for example, wasn't trying to understand itself in the way that scholars try to understand it. We have (or think we have) a different purpose. So we attempt to recover the forgotten, the lost, the texts tossed onto -- to borrow a phrase from Harold Weber -- the garbage heap of memory. And a lot of good stuff has come from doing this. REALLY good, seriously important stuff.

So what's the problem with the digital archive, presuming that eventually, everything will actually be made available and set on equal terms? It can feel like the undoing of Enlightenment, the total victory of some sort of moral or intellectual relativism, the final fracturing of epistemology into as many shards as there are ones and zeroes. We put all that stuff aside in order to get somewhere--why dig it all back up again? I've said it before and I'll say it again--to believe in everything is to believe in nothing. How can you form a theory when you have to account for everything, which, as I've said, is impossible? Does anything actually change, with respect to scholarship, with a completely restored archive? Do we do the same work with the awareness that we're leaving more out? Or will our research actually start to take SO much time, and attempt such extravagant levels of comprehensiveness, that producing anything takes forever? And wouldn't THAT be the end of Enlightenment? Edward Young (and later Emerson, who was certainly no Enlightenment figure, but the substance of what he said is the same) was saying in the mid-eighteenth that people would be better off doing a bit less reading and a bit more writing. But these concerns are already well-trod ground.

Inifinity is the death of meaning. You need an endpoint to give anything you do purpose. It's only the fact that life ends that makes life special. So in that respect, the digital archive is a bad thing. We'll never be able to make sense of it all. Something will contradict everything. It won't cohere, everything will be refutable, and we'll all have to embrace nihilism. And that's just depressing. It might be the reality of things. But why should we be flummoxed by realities? History might not be teleological (religious doctrines aside), but wouldn't it be nice if we kept on thinking we could make it go someplace good anyway? If we treat it that way, might it not happen? Is that more important?

The only hope with respect to the digitization of the archive and the negative effects it could have on scholarship is the possibility that Enlightenment isn't over. That complete availability might return us to a purer Baconian enterprise. The eighteenth century attempted to systematize prematurely. Bacon warned us about that. Then Romanticism came along and splintered everything up into individuality and specialization. The disciplines burrowed narrow and deep for a couple hundred years. We exhausted the potential of what was available. And we have seen -- with interdisciplinarity, with dedesciplinarity -- the beginning of a return to systematizing. But perhaps we the moment has still not come.

I submit that we are trapped in a fractal. That knowledge, as a system, works the same way. The micro level looks just like the macro; the pattern repeats. Enlightenment built its systems out of print. We used what they built to build more systems. Our systems will be the foundation of larger systems. And we will discover that what we thought was a system--or a discipline, a theoretical approach, whatever--was actually just a tiny piece of a much, much larger system that operates the same way but contains everything built over generations of scholarship. I use the encyclopedia to demonstrate this. Every individual edition of an encyclopedia looks like the as of yet unwritten "master" encyclopedia, that will contain all the knowledge of its predecessors. It will be complete, just as each edition was "complete" in the time it was made. What if the entire system works this way? We're all just writing an unbound encyclopedia. What we do will be contained by the next one.

I'm not speaking metaphorically, here. I think the system of knowledge might actually work this way. We treat the Enlightenment like it's over. But the greatest trick the devil ever pulled...this is how the system organizes itself. We're part of that system.

Perhaps our not thinking we still serve its purposes is precisely what enables us to do so? We lose faith in the system--and in doing so we eventually engender precisely those conditions that Bacon predicted would enable the system to emerge?

Well? Anyone want to drink my Kool-Aid? If it all comes true remember you heard it here first. COPYRIGHT.

More is Less

2007-04-09T18:42:00.000-04:00

As I try to account for more in this dissertation proposal, I realize only that ever more is left out. Every sentence I write is an event horizon -- the outer edge of a phenomenon I don't understand and which I can only hope leads to some parallel dimension wherein my ideas actually make sense. Though I suspect it's simply a place of infinite density whereat I'll just be crushed into oblivion or spewed out in the form of a depressive Barnes and Noble employee.

Earlier I likened the proposal in its current manifestation to an octopus with a confidence problem trying to juggle two bowling balls, an anvil, four cats, and a chainsaw.

As I've said, I know there's a there there, but for the moment I'm completely off the edge of the map. It's a very difficult genre to work in, the dissertation proposal. Most of my peers have found it challenging, I think. I have set out to pick apart a truly capacious problem, more out of ignorance than ambition. This is the problem when one starts talking about systems. The whole point of a system is that everything's involved. I am no Isaac Newton, I can tell you that; nevertheless, here I am, trying to invent a calculus that'll explain the universe of print.

Here's a choice sentence: "The nature of futurity as a feature of writing changed with the proliferation of print; under the pressure of amassing knowledge in the form of texts, the division of the ephemeral from the durable constituted part of a broader process of epistemological hierarchization involved in the "progressive" model of history associated with Enlightenment ideology."

It's one of the first, and one of the last I believe in.

Less is More

2007-03-31T18:14:00.000-04:00

In part of my ongoing dissertation proposal avoidance, I am writing here about my latest realization of the obvious: that the technological developments that permitted the widespread possibility of arriving at posterity in the eighteenth century are the same that made it more difficult to do so. This is sort of the verbose way of saying that to believe in everything is to believe in nothing. It is also the same problem that we're currently having with respect to the digitization of the archive. Anyone who's ever written anything will know that there's some as of yet indeterminate saturation point--a point at which one must simply put down the book, pick up the pen, and make peace with the knowledge that not everything that could be accounted for will be. The accessible archive grows with each pass of the scanner; the field of knowledge spreads out like a centerless universe. And here we are trying to make maps. We cannot read it all.

This of course is not new. The eighteenth century saw the same problem at work; in the field of what became the sciences, the encyclopedists sought to answer it. Chambers' Cyclopaedia aspired to be both 'compleat' knowledge and to render other texts superfluous (of course, Chambers knew it was not, in fact, complete, as some things were surely left out and the pace of knowledge production quickly rendered each edition out of date). One couldn't hope to waltz into the library, start at the lower left corner and read one's way around and to the top. One, after all, has to eat at some point before one dies. The encyclopedia was intended--or so its author-compilers professed--to make the whole field of knowledge available and relatively manageable. You can't walk around the whole circle of the library, but you could the encyclopedia (which word, of course, means walking a circle).

Of course, this period also witnessed the problematization of complete reading's other half--complete writing. The encyclopedias had their own answer to this--future editions, supplemental entries, and so forth. But the novel, which under Fielding and especially Richardon's direction tried to play the same game, couldn't quite hope to survive that way. It doesn't constitute an enclosed generic system. How does an encyclopedia arrive at posterity? By making offspring (to follow the metaphor) and its own futurity a generic convention. What on earth is a novelist to do? Once Tom Jones marries Sophia or Clarissa dies, the story is more or less over. How do you--you're a novel--remain relevant? What's your generic future look like?

What I'm getting at here, to break the flow of thought, is the extent to which arriving at posterity (sub-construed as generic and/or textual--and not necessarily material--durability) depends upon, in the eighteenth century from, say, 1700-1771, the ability of a text or genre to contain and control the threat rendered by proliferation. As an organizational function, the ability to stand in for other texts would serve a text well in keeping it afloat upon the ocean of printed material. You don't need to read epistles, poems, essays, plays, etc. separately if you can read them all in this new thing, the novel. Hence the novel becomes an encyclopedia of genres.

This is all about principles of reduction and substitution as necessary to generic durability. Take, for example, Pope's translation of Homer. It's Homer, OK, but it's Pope. And perhaps a lot more Pope than Homer. Two collapse into one; the field is reduced and contained by Pope's translation. There's a better example than this to use--translations are a tricky matter.

Concerns about proliferation came very early in the period. Swift openly fretted them. If you want to last at all--even in the short term--you have to get above the field (you're still a book). At the beginning of the century, you emulated or imitated what had already proved its ability to reach posterity--the Ancients. Pope updates and stands in for Homer--bingo, instant classic (or so he might have had it). As the century wore on, you would do this be being new, a work of "original" genius. How do you be original? Well, Fielding thought it was by combining (and thus containing) other genres within his narrative framework. He writes himself a comic epic in prose. Criticism also emerged as an organizational mechanism. Rather than represent all knowledge, a text would represent "good" or "bad" knowledge according to whatever critical standards were in place, or which critics were trying to put in place. Then the anthology, and then the canon--which is the ultimate in reduction and substitution, if not fair representation (thanks largely to criticism). If durability is usefulness over time (as I have defined it elsewhere--though this definition might be genre-specific, and in turn depends on the definition of utility, a loaded, protean term in the period, especially towards the end), then would a text not maximize utility by "doing the work" of multiple texts?

In case you're wondering, yes, I link the rise of the novel to these principles of reduction and generic durability. Novels were the frequently the longest fictional texts, but compared to the amount of print out there, they were very short--just like the encyclopedia.

Hm. Does the epic "die off" in part because it has a relatively low length-to-utility ratio in the context of antiproliferation principles of reduction/substitution? An epic is just an epic? So it can't compete with other forms that "do more?"

Enough for now.

As an aside, does my posting this stuff open my ideas to theft, or by posting them do I stake a kind of claim to them in time? Or should I not be worrying about this? Or am I revealing a shocking arrogance by suggesting that my ideas are either worthy of theft or laying claim to?

Zoom Shock

2007-03-27T22:45:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, I had a two hour meeting with one of the members of my dissertation panel and as usual I am still recovering four hours later from what I refer to as his benevolently enthusiastic attempts to kill me. I grapple with this professor over matters of technodeterminism, systematicity, and humanism, so those of you who know me in what the kids call the meatspace will now know his identity.

It was a great conversation, and I took copious notes. I will spare you the details until I have synthesized them into a series of connected ideas that reflect more of my thinking and less of his. It began with a proposal that would essentially investigate the ways in which different genres produce different expectations with respect to temporal existence. There is a relationship between genres and futures; a relative framework that does not refer to or depend upon notions of absolute time or space. I am not interested in producing a dissertation that posits Book A as being durable for X amount of years, in that Johnsonian sense of not calling something a classic until it has lasted a century. That would be absolute time. I quite agree and have done work on generic futurity with respect to the encyclopedia, and it is from that work that most of these conversations and this professor's confidence in my ability to negotiate the abstract philosophical approach come.

I do not necessarily share this confidence, as I do not have the body of knowledge at my command, particularly with regards to genre.

This sentence, I thought, was quite interesting: "The future as a feature of a genre or system." Now that's good stuff, and I think I understand it, and that I could write about it. It's the zoomed-out look at my interest in durability and posterity. The eighteenth century is the period to choose because of print. The proliferation of print comes with a whole bunch of organizational quandaries to which genre formation, amongst other things, is the response. How exactly do we DEAL with all of this information, especially when there's no hierarchy? Well, we get a hierarchy, dammit. Who's we? We is the SYSTEM. It's self-organizing, and the possibility of literary posterity emerges as a function of that organizational imperative. Categories of ephemeral and durable emerge out of proliferation and accrual. Some number of texts, at some point (a point I shall have to determine, and which need not be a single moment or year), must be discarded, or set aside, or otherwise reorganized. Likewise, some must be retained, or elevated. Hence the distinction between literature as just any old writing and Literature as, well, Literature.

The novel and the encyclopedia, which are two very closely related genres, "make sense" in this system because they do the job of replacing and/or displacing other texts. Chambers' encyclopedia set out to do this in no uncertain terms, and that was as early as 1728. It would not be until later in the century that the novel would start to do the same thing, and I would submit that (and be kind here, I'm just talking out loud) that might be because following the epistemological split that reconstituted fiction as distinct from what became the modern fact, it took the former a few more years to reach the point of systematic organizational recalibration already passed by the latter.

Which brings us to the point whereat I introduced the problem of facticity within the literary system. The fact is the most durable form of knowledge; it is a thing (a statement, a concept) that constitutes a determinate epistemic unit. The fact, in its modern incarnation, belongs to the sciences, to things that "really" are. "Fact" has no purchase in fiction (fiction, of course, may make use of facts, but--well, wait for it). The entire system of knowledge that constitutes what we call the hard sciences is, or seeks to be, based on facts in order to produce more facts. Something, I submit, should occupy the role of "facts" in the other formerly related but increasingly distinct system--literature. "Truth" becomes the province of fiction. What do I want to call the determinate epistemic units of fiction? I think that, like the "facts" of the so-called hard sciences, they accrue over time, and require "future" usage to retroactively constitute them as such. They must be treated within the system of literature as facts are in the system of natural philosophy. The "facts" of a genre or a system are the texts (or snippets, quotations, what have you) that are "used" by other writers in the fashioning of new truths. They are the building blocks of this different epistemology. Again, it makes sense that a novel--like an encyclopedia--should be a heteroglossic collection of generic facts, organized and interpolated in order to create a "complete" self-contained system that offers Truth--which is precisely what the novels of Fielding and Richardson did. That condition of generic and textual facticity (this distinction needs WAY more unpacking) is, perhaps, a defining quality of durability.

I haven't sorted out yet what happens after Richardson. But there seems to me to be another organizational recalibration within the literary system. At nearly the same time as the Britannica did, fiction embraced a kind of disciplinarity. Romanticism elevated individuality and isolation in place of universals and connectedness just as the encyclopedia separated the various parts of knowledge into their own disciplines rather than attempting to carry on the earlier editions' attempts at systematizing. Wordsworth, also at this time, determined that it was his unique combinations of words on the page that would last by giving pleasure--a pleasure dependent on his language. For that reason he chose the language of simple men, as, according to him, it was the most durable. His words. So, well, there.

Now I KNOW there's a dissertation in here somewhere.

The Wikirstaff Papers

2007-03-17T11:47:00.000-04:00

I don't contribute to Wikipedia, but I remain fascinated by it. For the last couple of years, I have been thinking about the war between it and the Britannica, and though I know that Wikipedia will ultimately win, I always revel in the problems that keep bringing it to the websites of CNN and the Drudge Report.

Most recently, as many of you will know, Wikipedia, or one of its contributers, got a wee bit into the Bickerstaff business with respect to the comedian known as Sinbad. Someone altered the entry on the latter to reflect that he had died of a heart attack (view CNN's report on it here). A user quickly picked it up, forwarded the link, and quickly caused a wave of mourning for the recently undeceased.

Naturally, I thought of Jonathan Swift and The Bickerstaff Papers, in which Swift declares the death of the astrologer John Partridge, much to Partridge's dismay. The following is from The Tatler, No. 1, April 12 1709:

I have in another Place, and in a Paper by it self, sufficiently convinc'd this Man that he is dead, and if he has any Shame, I don't doubt but that by this Time he owns it to all his Acquaintance: For tho' the Legs and Arms, and whole Body, of that Man may still appear and perform their animal Functions; yet since, as I have elsewhere observ'd, his Art is gone, the Man is gone.

I should very much like to think that the nefarious editor of Sinbad's entry was up to something similar, though I doubt it. We hardly needed someone to resurrect Sinbad only to inform us of his passing. His character -- his art -- has been long enough in Fortune's mausoleum to render the Wikipedian obituary superfluous. I do like the idea, though, of Wikipedia as a site of this sort of discourse. Obviously it would ruin whatever integrity the site aspires to have, but as a source of information increasingly trafficked by more and more of the world, it seems an ideal location in which to recreate the sort of "universal" stir enjoyed by the papers of Steele and Addison.

Alas, 'tis not to be. Wikipedia, naturally, locked then entry for the moment in order to prevent another wonderful phenomena of the modern age. "Knowledge" -- which is or will become as synonymous with Wikipedia as it once was with the Britannica -- is subject to vandalism. That's a hell of a thing to be able to say. Not error, not lies, not misinformation, not even satire, if it was that, but vandalism. I'm not sure what the ramifications of this are, but I'm certain they're interesting.

Poe(taster)

2007-03-05T17:54:00.000-05:00

In a typical act of hubris, I have volunteered to lecture on the Edgar Allan Poe component of our syllabus. I ascend the scaffold in April; however, having little or no experience with either Poe or lecturing, I am already nosing about the required texts. They include: "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Purloined Letter," "The Imp of the Perverse," and "The Cask of Amontillado."

I read all of these as an undergraduate, and of course I can recite a few of the stanzas of "The Raven" from memory, thanks largely to The Simpsons and James Earl Jones. I have referenced "The Imp" on occasion, wrote a term paper on the author's use of architectural symbolism in "Usher" (and "William Wilson"), and have had a least one dram of amontillado. Beyond that, my knowledge of gothic literature, and particularly American gothic, is very little.

Not on the syllabus, but well worth reading and certainly a necessary part of my lecture will be "The Philosophy of Composition," a lecture Poe wrote to capitalize on the success of "The Raven." In it, he gives a rather idealized explication of the composition process and a brief explanation of how he conceived of Pleasure, Beauty, and Art. Though participating in the discourse of the sublime, Poe did not appear to think much of Burke or Kant; he links terror to Beauty rather than the sublime, and suggests (in "Usher") that though we are obviously affected by natural objects, "the reason, and the analysis, of this power, lie among considerations beyond our depth." If I were to chart it--and I would--the relationships might look like this:

Poe is the least clear on the element of Passion -- "the truly Passionate," he claims, "will comprehend" what he means by "homeliness." Truth and Passion might be equal in impact, but Poe clearly elevates Beauty as the most pure form of pleasure, a construction represented here by the heavy black bar. I have divided the branches because although truth and passion may be brought to serve the elucidation of Beauty by contrast, the precision and homeliness upon which they depend are "absolutely antagonistic" to it. This chart, I should say, is no more precise than Poe's brief treatment in this piece, and might benefit from different ordering. I think perhaps the placement of the Soul after Beauty might want tinkering. In essence, though, it is the contemplation of beauty that elevates the soul, which elevation is the effect of Beauty. Likewise, precision satisfies the intellect, which is satisfaction is the effect of Truth, and homeliness excites the heart, which excitation is the effect of Passion. All of these effects are pleasurable.

Of still more interest are Poe's thoughts on genre and form. As I am focused (and shall continue to write about, again and again) on what I am for the moment calling the problematic of the durability of knowledge (a term itself deserving of more unpacking than it will suffer here), I could not overlook Poe's consideration of the subject with respect to genre. He addresses this quite clearly in "The Poetic Principle":

A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax. De Beranger has wrought innumerable things, pungent and spirit-stirring; but, in general, they have been too imponderous to stamp themselves deeply into the public attention; and thus, as so many feathers of fancy, have been blown aloft only to be whistled down the wind.

I have bolded "enduring" because it's a variant of my dissertation buzzword: durable. Poe suggests that neither a work too long nor too short can sustain a unity of effect; too short, as above, and it fails to impress. Too long, and it fails to cohere. We retain only those parts or moments that elevated our souls, and therefore have imperfect memories of the text (I am convinced I shall have to have a chapter on memory). Poe does not in this text define the soul beyond its being that entity subject to elevation by Beauty.

Unfortunately, Poe is both too late and of the wrong nation to find a home in my dissertation, but his work has informed my thinking, particularly as he uses Paradise Lost as his example of a poem too long properly to call itself such. I have very mixed emotions regarding these discoveries. They make me wonder if I'm working in the wrong period.

More on Poe to follow.

Compiled upon a New Plan

2007-03-02T22:02:00.000-05:00

This is a plate from my latest acquisition -- a facsimile of the first edition Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771). I first became fascinated by early encyclopedias in the autumn of 2005. The professor of my "Genres of Enlightenment" course kindly permitted me to borrow his, and I found it absolutely enthralling, both materially and conceptually. I wrote about the durability of knowledge and the function of the encyclopedia with respect to that durability at the level of individual edition and genre (those of you interested in encyclopedias -- that poor genre too often overlooked by eighteenth-centuryists in favor of the novel and periodical -- should absolutely thumb through Richard Yeo's Encyclopaedic Visions).

The image to the left is that of a dial, described by William Smellie (the compiler of the first edition) thusly:

An universal dial, shewing the hours of the day by a terrestrial globe, and by the shadows of several gnomons, at the same time: together with all the places of the earth which are then enlightened by the sun; and those to which the sun is then rising, or on the meridian, or setting.

The description is followed by instructions on how to build one and how to use it. Naturally, I rather want one.

The plates throughout the edition are wonderful: there are astronomical charts explaining retrograde motion that look as though they were done by spirograph; intricate drawings of various machines and engines; charts of eighteenth-century shorthand symbols; examples of sheet music, bookkeeping records, anatomical sketches. It is not difficult to imagine myself actually reading the whole thing cover-to-cover. What is difficult to imagine is why the people at Britannica decided to reproduce the thing and offer it for sale. It can be purchased directly from their website for $195. They say it "lends an unmistakable air of prestige to any home or office." That rather smacks of buying books by the yard, I think, and I don't imagine anyone who has $200 lying around would purchase the thing for the prestige of it (for the record, I received it as a gift, but if I hadn't I absolutely would have bought it eventually).

I shall be consulting the three volumes of the edition severally over the course of my dissertation. Indeed, the temptation to use the thing as an encyclopedia of the eighteenth century is nearly overwhelming. Will I go to Locke when I need Locke, or will I go to Smellie's entry on Metaphysics -- which he lifted from Locke wholesale? What epistemological traps do I risking falling into? Are they the same as those fallen into by the original users?

At any rate -- anyone who wishes to know about any part of knowledge as it stood in the last quarter or so of the eighteenth century, please let me know. I'll look it up for you.

Pop Culture Wars

2007-02-26T18:36:00.000-05:00

A class on Moby Dick currently underway at my institution of higher learning (and lower earning) has made use of references to said novel in popular culture. I rather like the idea, and as I am interested in the ways in which the literature of my period(s) (Early Modern and the Long Eighteenth Century) has persisted over time, I thought I would note down usage when I encountered it. Hence last week's post on Studio 60.

On Friday, I was less shocked than aggravated to hear the judge presiding over the Anna Nicole Smith body case -- which at this point has begun to take on a distinctly Burke-and-Hare feel -- compare the now noisomely deceased former person to Shakespeare's Ophelia. "She's a complex person," the judge said. Matt Lauer, in his metacommentary on the media's coverage of the story, cited greed, treachery, and "a climax more dramatic than an episode of Law and Order" as the similarities. His interviewee, Dr. Keith Ablow, said that the case "certainly does have the elements of a Shakespearean drama."

I realize that my instinct to rush to Shakespeare's defense is that of the intellectual elitist who forgets that a fair amount of the best work ever to appear in the English language did so between bear-baitings and amidst an unsavory collection of prostitutes and venereal diseases. Nevertheless, I weep to think that the 21st-century answer to Shakespeare might actually be Anna Nicole Smith. As my students make ever clearer, however, my hopes to beat the Lauers and Ablows of the world must ultimately come to naught. The best I can hope for, then, is to correct them.

To wit:

Anna Nicole Smith has precious little in common with Ophelia. If comparisons to Hamlet must be drawn, it seems clear that she is much more like Gertrude--a rich widowed woman in a dubious relationship with a money-and-power seeking man, who also has an equally dubious relationship with a suicidal son, who didn't get on with said money-and-power seeking man. How the presiding judge in the case could overlook these obvious parallels is beyond me.

Stepping away from Shakespeare and focusing attention on the baby, I find the story to be rather entertainingly Dickensian. An orphaned child? Unknown paternity? A mother of questionable morals dead before her time? A contested will? A fortune in the balance? Bleak House, anyone? Great Expectations? Oliver Twist?

What say you? If we must defile what canon-ballers call Literature with comparisons to the tabloid tawdries of our own time, should we not take pains to make them accurate? What text do you think this coffin-load of unfortunates digs up?

The 4AM Miracle

2007-02-19T22:20:00.000-05:00

This is the title of the most recent episode of Studio 60, a show to which I'll give another season's worth of Monday nights if the network will. Certainly it pales in comparison to Aaron Sorkin's early work on The West Wing, and there have been more than a few stumbles in the arc so far, but tonight's episode was, I think, a step in the right direction.

I do so love it when a show waxes literary (especially now that "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader" threatens to melt my TV screen with its stultifying stupidity, and after having seen just today adult humans replying "Asia" and "Amsterdam" when asked to name a country besides "America" that begins with "a"). The episode title, Matt tells his four-person writing team, refers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's semi-somnambulant composition of "Kubla Khan."

The author thus continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things.

Matt is stuck, you see, and seeks a 4:00AM miracle to unstick him. He gets it in the return of Harriet from the clutches of a rival suitor. I am not, generally speaking, a romantic, and even less a romanticist, but there was something deeply appealing to me about Sorkin's use of what even to initiates must have been a fairly esoteric literary reference. I find the continuity reassuring; Sorkin and the world he writes has a bibliography a little in common with the one that shapes my own consciousness. It quite takes me back to my life before the Academy, when I delved into literature to find truth rather than arguments -- flesh and blood instead of wheels and metal.

I realize that it's just a TV show and not (yet) a very good one, but tonight it reminded me, however accidentally, that literature can still be something that happens to us. It does not have to be a thing upon which we merely act. Tonight I hope for restlessness!

Pick a number between one and ten...

2007-02-12T11:46:00.000-05:00

...and the good (possibly mad) scientists at the Max Planck Institute, Oxford University, and UCL will tell you whether or not you'll be honest if I guess it correctly. According to a recent article in The Guardian, developments in brain scanning technology have led to the capability of detecting and correctly interpreting human intention. Theoretically, I could scan your brain while questioning you and know if you plan to lie, commit a crime, or vote Republican.

The research remains in its early stages, but it is moving along quickly enough to bring up the old scientific stumbling-block of ethics. What will the technology be used for? Whose hands are the wrong hands? Can it be used to find out how many more blades Gillette will add to their razors before the madness ends?

The article brings up your Big Brother, Minority Report scenarios, and suggests that scientists are well aware of them. I am no Luddite, and I believe that advances in technology have done more harm than good (the jury remains out on the internet), but I was particularly struck by the following snippet:

The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. "We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence."

It's probably safe to assume that Prof. Haynes didn't mean it quite the way it reads out of context. But it certainly sounds as though I will be somehow obliged to prove my innocence before I have done anything. One wonders precisely what I've done to get myself into that situation beyond looking shifty-eyed and making wisecracks like the one above about voting Republican. In any case, it seems that in the future, happily, those of us who don't intend to commit any crimes won't be denied the opportunity to prove it.

Here's another quotation that gave me pause:

"Do we want to become a 'Minority Report' society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen?," she [Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University] asked. "For some of these techniques, it's just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don't want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences.

I find this less than reassuring. The quotation suggests that there are scientists, and then there is society; the former will explore the frontiers of science, the latter will have to deal with the consequences and make the choices. Scientists -- not that I know many of them -- don't seem to be much in the habit of letting go once they've caught on to something. It's just a matter of time. It will be society's job, though, to use the technology for good instead of evil. Not to be an alarmist, but when has a technology that had the potential to do harm been developed and then done no harm? It looks to me like we're in for yet another of those uncomfortable trade-offs.

I bring this up because I have recently had my first face-to-face encounters with proper scientists in a graduate seminar I am auditing on Aesthetics and Cognitive Science. In our first session, someone brought up the possibility of determining a "minimum set of conditions" necessary to evoke an aesthetic response or experience. After we have worked our way through Burke, Hogarth, Kant, et al., we will move into neural science and psychophysics. The people in the room don't appear to me to be any of your MKUltra, Manchurian Candidate, Orwellian overlord types, but as of yet there has been no discussion about the consequences of discovery. Imagine what happens if we managed to define the set of conditions. Do we get art, or poetry, or novels, by algorithm? Computer authors? To what will the lowest common denominator reduce us all? How soon before the GOP and DNC latch on and start bringing out a more perfectly manipulative political ad? What will Gillette do with the knowledge?

The quest to convince (or manipulate) audiences has been the subject of philosophic and scientific discourse at least since the days of Longinus. Thus far, though, the quest has remained more philosophy than science; trial and error, precedent, data collected after the fact. Ad campaigns for people and products still fail. Those with the power and will to do "evil" have not had the benefit of a complete defined set of procedures based on the hard-wiring of the human brain. I am not necessarily suggesting that the course I am now taking will lead there. I am ignorant enough about psychophysics and cognitive science to speculate wildly.

Am I sitting in a room full of future Oppenheimers? What draws the line between proceeding cautiously and choosing not to proceed at all?

Search Me!

2007-02-08T19:46:00.000-05:00

It has just come to my attention (and not as the result of direct action) that the MLA International Bibliography now turns up a result when my name is searched in the "document author" field.

Yes, I am slightly chuffed by this. But in the words of an archery instructor from my early adolescence upon the occasion of my hitting a perfect bullseye ("centre gold, American bratling," she would say): "Once is luck. Twice is skill."

One would think that publication would have resulted in my having some measure of confidence in my academic fortitude. If anything, I have less now than ever. My experience so far of every triumph I have had in academia is that it immediately diminishes in size and significance immediately after achievement. Alps on alps arise.

I am only as good as whatever I'm doing next. When, I wonder, if ever, does one get beyond the prelude?

Talent Borrows

2007-02-03T19:10:00.000-05:00

And genius, as they say, steals. In the eighteenth century, Edward Young might have drawn the line between imitation and emulation. In his Conjectures on Original Composition, Young attempts to qualify "genius," and at the generic level, it turns out to have something in common with pornography -- at least as Justice Potter Stewart famously understood it:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

A pretty fair assessment, I'd say, and now that I've mentioned pornography perhaps my gracious reader will follow me to the real point of my inquiry: when does what we might normally call plagiarism, or intellectual property violation, or just flat-out idea-pilfering achieve sufficient "originality" to transcend accusations of hackery? When does the borrowing talent become the stealing genius? What does "the pickpurse of another's wit," to use Sidney's term, need to do to what he lifts in order to gain the "legitimacy" of homage? In attempting to answer these questions, I find myself deferring again and again to the judgment of Justice Stewart.

Last night, I went with M to see Pan's Labyrinth. Setting aside for the moment that the Powers-That-Be have once again deemed Americans too dumb to understand the original title (we don't know our fauns from our fawns, you see), I quite liked it. This, though, is besides the point. The point is the number of similarities between this film and others texts (many of which M pointed out, and some of which, I think, got in the way of her enjoyment). To wit (spoiler alert!):

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: In the fantasy world, the first creature Lucy encounters is a faun, Mr. Tumnus.
The Shining: Capitan Vidal duplicates Jack's half-conscious, half-crazed pursuit of a small child through a labyrinth.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: A book given to Ofelia by the faun has blank pages upon which writing and images magically appear, much like Tom Riddle's journal.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: That faun has some seriously Entish qualities.
Beetlejuice: Ofelia uses a piece of chalk to draw a door that opens into another world, as do Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis.
Almost every movie with a torture scene: Show the instruments first and do a little speech before we begin!

The list leaves much out, and of course does not mention the perfectly reasonable and perhaps necessary generic similarities to other films about children and escapism in times of war. Life is Beautiful, The Chronicles of Narnia, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and so on. Nor do I offer the list to suggest that any of the more precise intertextualisms it contains in any way damage the credibility of the film as an "original" work. I am simply questioning precisely what is at stake in those similarities--to what extent are they conscious references, independent conceptions, etc.? What difference do they make to how we read the film or judge the merits of the screenwriter and director?

I think that, as with literature, there is a language of film that depends to some extent on both cultural literacy and cultural capital. Intertextuality demonstrates awareness and knowledge of textual history and links the new text to the old in the minds of the reader. The text places itself in history by presenting strains of the appropriate generic ancestors. Alternately, or perhaps simultaneously, it provides an outlet for Bloom's omnipresent Anxiety of Influence. If you can't escape Stanley Kubrick, then subsume him; pay homage. The scene, though similar to that in The Shining, takes place in different context and occurs as an organic part of the story; therefore, I would say this is an instance of emulation rather than imitation. The matter of the chalk-drawn doorways, on the other hand, strikes me as the reverse. Del Toro uses the device wholesale, for almost the same purpose as Burton, and with no significant difference in execution.

Again, this is not to say he should not have done so. A "new" text must have "old" elements within it as an aid to categorization and comprehension. Originality and genius, amongst other things, must depend in some part upon a ratio of old and new -- a demonstration of inheritance and mutation rather than mere cloning. I use such evolutionary terminology not by accident, though that usage may be problematic. Adaptation is, I think, as crucial to the survival of a text or genre as it is to a species.

For my part, I think Del Toro got the mixture right -- but only just.

The Collective

2007-01-29T11:33:00.000-05:00

Though usually given to solitary behavior, members of the species Studentum Graduatis are occasionally known to travel in groups. While other animals have been given appropriate collective noun designations, the "graduate student" has none. Therefore, in the interest of science, I am soliciting recommendations now.

This experiment in taxonomy began, as one would expect, amongst my own --insert collective noun here-- of peers. Here are a few of the suggestions:

An Insecurity of Graduate Students
A Daze of Graduate Students
A Tower of Graduate Students
A Sulk of Graduate Students
A Gloom of Graduate Students
A Text of Graduate Students

I favor "Tower" and "Insecurity," but I think we can do better. The winner will receive mention in an as-of-yet unwritten academic masterwork.

The Candidate

2007-01-24T19:04:00.000-05:00

In the fabled words of Henry V: let there be sung Non Nobis and Te Deum. I realize that the comprehensive exams are the Harfleur rather than the Agincourt of the doctoral process, but I am determined to enjoy this victory nonetheless. Please help yourself to a cigar.

In retrospect, I over-prepared. I read all but 10 or so items on my lists. I can't speak to how much I remember. The orals component did not go quite so smoothly as did the written, for which part I enjoyed a full week of remarkable lucidity, but nor did they bring down heaps of criticism on my head. After a minor but somewhat mortifying scheduling mishap that delayed the start by 45 minutes, we were underway.

Et sic per gradus, ad mia tenditur.

I believe my best answers in orals were in response to questions about the development of poetic authority in the Early Modern period. In the essay, I started with Sidney's Defence of Poesy and managed to incorporate, in order, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, and Milton -- not quite chronological, but not bad for 2988 words. Questions were mostly directed towards my reading of Milton as a dis-integrated author in Paradise Lost. Milton , I claimed, deliberately put recognizable elements of his personal and political identities in the mouths of multiple and oppositional characters in the poem in an effort to prevent a unified "Milton" emerging from the text -- a Milton whose reputation would yoke the epic to the limiting context of his role as a Cromwellian. In order to maximize his poetic authority -- something that, keeping in line with notions of sola scriptura, had to derive from the poem rather than the poet -- he had to rise above the personal and political.

My best essay explored the relationship of generic durability with respect to The Dunciad, Chambers' Cyclopaedia, and Tristram Shandy. As I have already written, my thoughts in this area are at the foundation of my nascent dissertation proposal, so it was nice to hear that they were very well received. My answers in orals, however, were not as well delivered. I did not fare so well in responding to a change in the angle of attack. I dithered over questions of technodeterminism and its relation to the durability of knowledge despite having spent ample time with the texts or actual persons of Marshall McLuhan and Cliff Siskin. My interviewer distinguished between technodeterminism and the generic or classificatory approach I took in the essay, and I did not make the transition gracefully. I think I too well convinced myself of the merits of my own agument, and resisted alternate approaches. A bad habit, to be sure.

At any rate, I was congratulated, told that it sounded like I was well on my way to a dissertation proposal, and advised to take a week or two off before I returned to tackle it properly.

So -- smoke if you got'em.

Pedagogue, agog

2007-01-02T14:31:00.000-05:00

I am taking a break from the heart-squeezing, brain-sizzling, throat-closing terror of the Exams Countdown (T-19hrs) to grapple with another, more quietly troubling reality: a greater number of my students may have plagiarized than I thought.

I committed an error of naivete; I assumed that substantial plagiarism would be detectable primarily by virtue of profound qualitative discrepancies. The writing of anything pilfered from that warehouse of temptation we call the internet would simply be so much better than that which the student would produce on his or own that I couldn't possibly fail to notice. Then I somehow found my way to something called directessay.com. Though unfamiliar with the site, I very well understood the premise. Essays for sale on a range of topics, with a wide range of word counts, and with no shred of academic integrity (though I must acknowledge the site does insist that its materials are for "research purposes only," that it must be cited, and that plagiarism is bad, mmmkay, etc. Clearly this is akin to an assault-rifle manufacturer making extra-special sure you understand that its guns aren't really for shooting).

I did a search for Doctor Faustus, remembering that a disproportionate number of my students this term chose to write their second papers on it. The site search engine did its thing and I got my first taste of what it had to offer--which is to say, rubbish. The snippets intended to entice you into purchasing one of these essays are, to the trained eye looking for the wrong thing, laughable. Reconsidering their purpose, however, reveals the genius of the thing. I assumed that an essay mill would seek to provide its customers with work that would make them look very good--polished writing, few errors. How little did I know.

When a pool shark tries to hustle you, he makes sure he beats you by just enough to keep you laying bets. It's no good running 100 balls every time he addresses the table if that compels the mark to flee the hall with wallet unbreached. You lose 100 to 98, 100 to 96. They play worse than they can to keep you in the game. It's called "playing under speed."

These essays (the ones I saw, at any rate) are just bad enough to be the real thing. They're a hustle. I don't know from where they get them--perhaps they are or were the real thing, and they're just being recycled for profit. They sound like they were written by their intended buyers. I must admit, I wasn't looking for this when I had my plagiarism glasses on. Obviously I will be far more vigilant in the future now that I know that bad writing is no guarantee of original work. I don't know if any of my students actually purchased or in other ways borrowed material from this site or one of its nefarious brethren--I certainly prefer to think that they did not. Nevertheless, my confidence is diminished.

Which brings me to another site of which I'd heard: turnitin.com. Every Moriarty must have its Holmes; this site promises to sniff out plagiarism by allowing instructors to submit student work that is then subjected to a thorough investigation. I don't have any experience with it--if any of you do, I'd like to hear about it. Individual licenses are available, as are departmental ones. If the site does good work--verifiably good work--I don't see why the department shouldn't pony up the dough if the price isn't extortionate. If the problem is as serious as everyone seems to think it is, then those of us on the "front lines" should be provided with adequate means to combat it. A google search of a few suspect lines won't always reveal a crime of intellect.

Obviously, that's a combative stance, and it's not the one I want to assume automatically with my students. But they do plagiarize, some of them, and those that do deserve to get caught.

Aphra Behn (deceased)

2006-12-31T10:07:00.001-05:00

Aphra Behn
Originally uploaded by Scriblerus.

This photo represents Behn's (or Behn's eptitaph writer's) answer to some portion of the post below. The epitaph reads, "Here lies a proof that wit can never be defence enough against mortality." Harold Bloom, of course, would not have granted her wit--he called her a fouth-rate playwright, at some point, I believe, and suggested that whatever immortality she gained by reentry to the canon reflected more poorly on us than it did well on her. Nevertheless, whomever did the chiseling had a more materialist sense of mortality than can do a writer any good to possess.

I've recently reexamined some of her poetry, and I've reread The Rover for the third time, and I cannot quite agree with the honorable Dr. Bloom on this matter. I find Behn's irrepressible disappointment in the Cavaliers fascinating. She's like a fan dedicated to a losing team, sitting in the bleachers and calling the players a bunch a bums, but going to every single game. If Rochester and has ilk had just manned up a bit, they might not have let those Roundheads walk all over them during the Civil Wars. Instead, a whole class of bluebloods ended up going as soft as brie and limp as boned fish. All these poor "o'er ravished" men running about with their swords pointing in entirely the wrong direction.

With Royalists like these, who needs Parliamentarians?

Displaced Author Function Seeks New Texts to Inhabit

2006-12-29T13:50:00.000-05:00

I, like many a mortal, am obsessed with notions of immortality. Until science figures out a way to download the entire working mind to some piece of solid-state, solar-powered, titanium-based something or other, however, the best we humans can hope for is genetic transmission or textual remembrance (text here incorporating all forms of "print," real or virtual, visual, oral, etc.). After thousands of years of writing, from cuneiform to hieroglyphics and on to little ones and zeroes brought to you by means I understand even less, and following countless astounding medical advances that threaten to extend the average human lifespan to and beyond the century mark, we are still faced with essentially the same choice as our most distant ancestors: reproduce, or write.

The vast majority of people attempt one or the other of these things, and for a similar majority the effort pleases more than the result.

It was fairly common in the eighteenth century for an author to refer to a text in terms of offspring, thereby conflating the two means into a single transferable item. The trope had (appropriately) Renaissance roots. As Mark Rose notes in Authors and Owners, "the most common figure in the early modern period is paternity: the author as begetter and the book as child" (38). Sidney, for example, called Arcadia "this child which I am loath to father." A century and a half later, David Hume claimed that his A Treatise of Human Nature "fell still-born from the press." For reasons that this blog will no doubt return to again and again, all texts are problem children, and, as with the real thing, one takes one's chances in spawning them. A text, though it may seem to spring fully-formed from the head of its creator, is really only half its parent's child; for it to have life, a reader must come along and take it up--as Hume's quotation above reveals. And there's no telling what manner of unsavory character might come along and nurture it out of its nature with his or her ridiculous (mis)reading. The next thing you know, the sweet little book over which you labored so hard has turned into a surly teenager that looks just like you but which everyone says is up to no good. You, the well-intentioned author-parent, have no recourse but to shrug and say, "it must have gotten that from it's reader's side of the family."

So there's really nothing to be done. Authors must die, texts have a life of their own. This brings me to Scriblerus, and the nature of this blog. In adopting and revivifying the name of the Scriblerians' erstwhile editor, author, and dupe, how do we affect each other? What quality of life do I give him, with respect to the one he had 250 years ago as well as those he enjoys in the hands of other modern writers (I am not the only Scriblerus on the web). Scriblerus was a collective creation; an unreal person with a real CV. To who else can we rightly attribute the Memoirs, if we have no idea who was responsible for the various parts of them? One edition on sale at Amazon attributes them to all the members of the Scriblerus Club; another flatly credits Pope alone. The minds that created his are all dead, but perhaps his mind could live on in the only world he ever truly inhabited.

If someone came along and actually wrote in the style of Scriblerus--never breaking character, addressing the same issues in a sort of Enlightenment-meets-Borat kind of way--would "Scriblerus" be any less the Scriblerus of Pope, Arbuthnot, Parnell, Swift, and the Earl of Oxford? Well, yes, obviously. The break in time gives ownership to his dead fathers. But if, Zorro-like, successive writers had inherited the role over generations, what then would have been the nature of his Authorship and immortality?