A post about form.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about form for awhile now — long before the Columbia conference, even. It’s been on my mind for several reasons this semester. I revisited Caroline Levine’s 2006 Victorian Studies article on “strategic formalism” back in March when I was briefly transforming my dissertation abstract into a “popular religion” project for the purposes of a fellowship application (final analysis: “religion” is totally plausible, “popular” perhaps less so) and found that I’d sort of caught up with it conceptually since the last time I tried to use it. I’ve been able to see Levine herself speak twice about the form issue at two different conferences, most recently at Columbia, and we had the chance to renew our own ongoing conversation about these issues, which — among other things — in turn is helping me think about my more general theoretical investments, whether it’s time for me to start calling myself a post-poststructuralist or post-deconstructionist or some other term that expresses the appropriate relation of allegiance, belatedness, and potential for surpassing the original.

During one of our Long 19th Century reading groups, Mia asked what the difference was between form and genre. The question threw me a bit, and I probably didn’t answer it all that well because we’ve been meeting on Tuesdays, which is a teaching day for me, and getting up at 6am ensures that I will be loopy by noon. But I think the question threw me more profoundly because I don’t really even think of those two things together. (In retrospect, I realize that I’m probably the weird one.) For me, form functions more capaciously — really as a way of organizing experience, which is more or less how Levine uses it in her work — whereas genre seems more narrowly focused on content, on a certain inflection given to what is contained by the form. In some ways, it seems too narrowly literary or aesthetic, where I understand form as a more general structuring principle. But it’s possible that this distinction is at its fuzziest precisely in literature and aesthetics (especially given how we teach “genres” in intro to lit classes, which probably should be “forms”).

I was surprised, in a way, to hear myself making such broad claims for form, if only because I wondered later whether I was moving away from being able to articulate a specific function for, say, literary/poetic form. I’ve heard people ask Levine this question — and I think I probably asked it myself at one point — and it does get a little bit tricky because at some level portability of structure begins to look like uniformity of function. Levine herself is pretty straightforward that, at least in a general theoretical sense, she isn’t giving literary form a privileged or special place (though she certainly doesn’t dismiss it either). With that being said, though, her examples are frequently from literature and in the VS article she says something about literary form existing in a “destabilizing” relation to other forms. This makes a lot of sense from the perspective of the kind of work that Warwick Slinn does on 19th-century poetry and theories of performative speech. Basically, his argument (largely in Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique but also in Victorian Poetry circa 2004) is that Victorian poetry’s specific relationship to language (especially in terms of suspending the difference between literal and figural meaning) allows it to expose the workings of other kinds of discourses, allows us to focus on what he calls “processes of signification,” how different kinds of institutions construct meaning, and so on. (Slinn doesn’t get cited as much as he should, but I do use his work as a starting point for my Maud article.)

If form is “destabilizing”–and for me a lot of Levine’s most interesting and helpful ideas have to do not so much with form itself, but with the way that *different* forms interact with each other, destabilizingly or not–I would also want to say that it is (or at least can be) enabling. This, at least, is where a lot of my work has been going as of late. I think I’ve always seen suspension this way, at least the suspension that’s been the subject of my dissertation. I realize that sounds paradoxical — it’s not exactly enabling to be mistaken for dead and buried alive — but in a more general, structural sense, suspension is enabling precisely because it allows for contradictory possibilities to interact with each other, creates a simultaneity that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and offers a kind of “container” for working through different possibilities. This is also how I’ve been thinking about religious forms — the ones I’m most interested in are the ones that enable particular kinds of engagement with faith and doubt or simply with the given conditions of one’s own life.

I don’t have a good intellectual defense for why that is right now. Among the many realizations I had at the Columbia conference, it occurred to me that I haven’t been thinking about form over the past year as much as I’ve been living it — particularly as a result of the turn that my practice of Zen meditation has taken. Zen is really into form, which is something that made me nervous for several years, but is now something that I find to be helpful, enabling, and often instructive. And it’s possible that one of the things I’ll be able to do this summer (one can dream) is start to make that more available to an intellectual articulation. For now, though, I’ll simply mention that in the Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom sutra (PDF) — one of the texts that we chant on a regular basis at the place I meditate — we find these lines: “form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.” This is something I think about a lot.

I’m stopping here mainly because I try to limit myself to 1,000-ish words (and because I’m self-conscious about being the only person blogging here) — I still want to work out some of my thoughts on method, function, the difficulty of talking about form in academic contexts, and why I thought it was great when Caroline Levine said during the Columbia Q&A that “it doesn’t all have to be rupture.” But you all know I can ramble. Would anyone want to have a discussion instead?

 

Digressive Reflections on Victorian Systems and Archives (NVSA, 4/15-17/11)

So, I found this year’s NVSA conference both incredibly entertaining and (somewhat surprisingly) moving.* This is also not to imply, of course, that NVSAs are not usually entertaining (or moving). But this one seemed to be even more so than usual. People really seemed to be going all out, particularly insofar as they created presentations that were truly multimedia in nature, and being — intimidatingly — good at it. By the end of the conference, one of my friends was like, “whoa, we really have to learn Power Point” — and he’s probably right.** But speaking for myself, at least, the challenge isn’t really learning the technical side of Power Point, but rather thinking in a more “digital” way — and I’m not sure Twitter counts.***

Beyond that, though, there were dinosaurs (and standard queer affect questions about dinosaurs) and moldy archives and cookbooks and streets — not to mention the White House-approved (no really) magic show at the banquet. These things make me of good cheer.**** Of course, these are also the parts of this conference — and any conference, really — that are the “you had to be there” moments, the ones that, well, don’t make it into the archive in the same way, the ones that maybe escape the system.

But of course these moments where we were or weren’t there are, arguably, all an archive ever really is — and our systems are always running to catch up with experience. And I think this is what I’m trying to get at when I say that the weekend was surprisingly moving, perhaps even poignant… this common thread, running through so many of these papers, so many of the efforts and projects that were represented here… this desire just to make things make sense. And all the lost possibilities that come with those efforts to arrange, understand, systematize, save, study, respond… remembering that all of those things that seem in retrospect to be so inevitable–how we organize archives, or even that we *have* archives, for instance–might not have been so at the time. (There are other stories, too–the divergence of anthropology and literary study, the time before we could conceive of dinosaurs, and so on…)

Bernard Lightman kicked off the Saturday keynote by stressing the commonalities between scientific and religious thinking–reminding  us, at least implicitly, that these two fields arose in some ways to deal with the same set of human needs: to explain and to want to be consistent, to reassure ourselves about the nature of reality, to be able to, well, make sense.  There’s something compelling (to me) about the struggle to organize experience (while also figure out how to read discontinuites, the gaps in the record–and also how to read among different mediums–the laptop and the printed page, the writing tablet of memory, even). There seems to be a real hopefulness in setting out to, say, rationalize the principles of political science according to that of geometry, to embark upon the project of distilling the best that has been thought and said.

Some of this, incidentally, is no doubt why I’ve been drawn back to strategic formalism lately, and even to some extent religion. I did have occasion to interrogate my relative lack of interest in Victorian science (save, of course, for the relatively narrow area of medical science’s debate over the signs of death). I was challenged especially by Vanessa Ryan’s talk on Herbert Spencer as a figure whose emphasis was on movement and function, not so much “what is this” but “what does this do”? I came away from that panel wondering if this sense of function is part of what still seems to be missing for me in accounts of new formalism–almost as if this is the thing that would make it really new–being able to apprehend movement as it moves, to respond to impermanence from impermanence.  And this turned out to be a version of the question I wanted to ask Veronica Alfano on Sunday before we ran out of time (and did ask her later on): if we put these short poems of Symons, these “moments” and “flashes” in motion on something like the zoopraxiscope, then what are we reading?

Perhaps another one of the questions of the weekend (in my mind) was communicability, how information is packaged and passed on, how it becomes “real ground.” From what some of the archival historians said, it almost seems like something becomes the “real ground” by not being intentionally archived… I was haunted by Paul Saint-Amour’s talk on archives and the fossil record, which raised this question of the accidental registry and problematized the very meaning of human agency (at the very least). This took on a more materialist (and Gothic) dimension in Christopher Keep’s talk on the Victorian “archive crisis” of the 1840s, the point at which it came to light that the records that secured the power of the British state were literally rotting away in basements or being sold off for 8 pounds per ton to fishmongers and jelly-makers (even though some of the paper was, as Keep put it, “too decayed even for the jelly-makers”). However, it’s clear that not every government is keeping up with its archival responsibilities, even today.

And then there’s the fragility of both system and archive: does it disintegrate if you touch it or bring it into the light? Is the magic gone if you can get your head around it? Can you laugh at the silliness but still admit later on, “I don’t know how he did that”? Marjorie Stone projected an image of Browning’s empty writing portfolio, complete with doodles and some transcribed lines from EBB. These aren’t usually the materials I work with, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make me feel something.

That brings up a question of method that I’m not going to take up here, because with the footnotes and everything I’m way over even my usual word count. (And I didn’t even get to talk about Asmodeus, the spirit of systems, or most of the papers that people gave.) But if it makes sense to end on omissions, then this might be a good ending. It was also a rather light year for literature papers–though I did feel like there was a bit more poetry than usual. But, then again, there’s always next year.

More immediately, there is tomorrow, when I head up to Columbia for the Politics of Form conference.

Wow do I love Spring on the East Coast Victorian studies circuit. 🙂

*Here I insert the usual caveats. I missed the first day. I didn’t sleep particularly well. I drank too much coffee. This is all way, way, way out of my field. Infelicities in my reporting should not reflect poorly on the speakers. I am being unsystematic and my archive is highly incomplete.

**I tweeted a link to “In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan a Stately Power Point Decree” in McSweeney’s a couple days before I left and now feel like that was a hopelessly outmoded move on my part.

***Except if it does — which was part of the point that Devin Griffiths was making in his reconsideration of  Matthew Arnold’s project of distilling “the best that has been thought and said” as a project of “Tweeting the Bible.” (I will admit, by the way, to enjoying the part where the talk was interrupted by a tweet from @Mat_Arnold. And if that makes me a geek, so be it.)  

****I liked the magic show, okay? But I will try to cut down on the footnoting.

 

Adventures in Minor Victorian Criticism

So I spent today’s ride on the North Jersey Coast Local looking through Thomas Blackburn’s 1967 study of Robert Browning’s poetry. It’s a book that somehow came across my radar a few weeks ago, enough so that I interlibrary loaned it and then completely forgot that I had done so — enough that I was completely surprised when I got the email saying the book was in.

I still haven’t quite figured out why this book was so important. I have, however, stumbled across what’s obviously a forgotten gem of Browning scholarship.  Some examples:

“Browning’s admirers have not been remarkable for their subtlety. Perhaps it is just their lack of subtlety which has attracted them to some aspects of the poet, for when he is off-form he is a bird of the same feather and shares their heavy obviousness of thought and feeling. Time may well be an acid in which bad verse and bogus critical opinion dissolves, but the process is a lengthy one. Robert Browning has not been dead for a hundred years and around his great poems there is an exceptionally thick rind of bad work for the acid of time.”

“No doubt Baudelaire’s angst and syphilis were as effective in keeping his work clear of rubbish as a post in the Board of Trade. All Browning had was Elizabeth Barrett.”

“Unfortunately, though In Memoriam was extremely popular the public had an equal relish for Tennyson’s sentimental and didactic verse. The poet’s wife was a piece of human litmus paper. He had only to dip the devoted creature into some new poem and her change of color would suggest its value – in current market prices, not unfortunately in terms of poetry.”

On the “climax of … falsity” in Browning’s “Christmas Eve”: “…the poem’s supposed vision of Christ; a vision described in terms which would delight the heart of any producer of a super-technicolor film about Jesus; and was probably no more a part of the poet’s actual experience than the ascent of Everest.”

Those, at least, were the highlights I was able to record in my iPod while I was on the train. I’m sure I missed many other gems because I was skimming. I do think that the problem of a good poet writing bad poetry is an interesting one, and I think that we do tend to shy away from discussions like that in our contemporary criticism. On the other hand, I’m not sure that anyone who relies so much on the “thick rind” metaphor for bad writing (that’s an image that crops up with rather alarming frequency) gets to criticize other people’s poetic process.

In other news: it’s NVSA time! Inaugurating the lovely season of Victorian-tasticness that culminates in the CUNY Victorian Conference. I’m a bit sad to be missing the Pickwick Papers reading tonight, but I’ll be driving (!!) over to Princeton in the morning for a full day of panels and the big banquet. Now that I have a WordPress app installed on my iPod, anything is possible — depending on whether Princeton’s generous with the wifi.

 

More dactylic hexameters than you can shake a stick at

…or not. (If you’re really interested, go here.)

See, I went to the Crossing the Bar conference at Penn a few weeks ago. It pretty much rocked. I tweeted about it. But ever since I’ve been sort of impossibly tongue-tied. As Mia can attest, I’ve had this post in draft form for several weeks now, coming back to it at intervals when I thought the midsemester chatter (working at two schools with two different spring breaks adds up to no spring breaks, etc.) was dying down, but never really being able to get the words out. I haven’t been totally idle in the interim: I eked out an abstract on Christina Rossetti and sent it to NAVSA and I’ve managed to start to rethink the old albatross of the chapter on Browning without the abject misery that was afflicting me in January and February — and both of these projects have become possible in part because of the jump start that my thinking got in Philly.

But to some extent, these inspirations have all been somewhat tangential to what the conference was actually about — I think one of the things that’s made it difficult for me to write any sort of reflection on the thing is that, at least right now, I happen to be doing something different from what most of the people at the conference were doing. It’s certainly not for the lack of notes I took. I guess the short postmortem would be something like: transatlantic Tractarianism, why “format” (in a quasi-bibliographic sense) matters to our interpretation of poetry, tensions between historical prosody and the intentional fallacy, whether it’s really “about” the poem (the speaker in question said no, I privately said yes and informal conversations occurred), Adah Isaacs Menken and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers paired in an incredibly interesting panel about late 19th century transatlantic performances, more broadsheet ballads, the thought that I really should go back and revisit my thinking about Clough one of these days (apologies for the self-referential linkage but it was one of my favorite POTW posts), Thelwall becoming sexy, and a shout-out to Arthur Quiller-Couch in a discussion of the poem “Invictus” that also included Ronald Reagan and Timothy McVeigh.

The important thing that happened for me that weekend is that I came away with a new sense of how to do scholarship on poetry. I mean, I’m not going to suddenly change my focus to historical prosody — I came to poetry late anyway and have a long way to go. And I’m probably also not going to get all super-historical or archive-y — I assume that y’all wouldn’t want me to do that anyway. What I’m getting at is something like a sense of how to get around a certain stalemate I’d been facing in the more classically deconstructionist / speech act readings of Victorian poetry — eventually it *doesn’t* seem that interesting to show that yet another poem, despite its claims to be about something else, is really about language. I mean, that was a really earthshattering revelation in the 80s and it was actually really earthshattering to me until about 2007. It still sometimes strikes me with the force of newness even now. But I was increasingly finding that it wasn’t enough to get me through the dissertation.

It’s harder to articulate the solution or new direction I’m envisioning now — I guess it’s just to say that the conference reminded me of all the different ways that poetry can matter (and all of the different things that mattering can mean) — historically and in the present. I have a feeling that this may have something to do with my increasing interest in Victorian religion and, for that matter, with why I keep being drawn back to Quiller-Couch.*

In short, it was almost enough to just sit in the very beautiful rooms provided by Penn on a very beautiful weekend provided by Spring and soak in the world as it was being made new in these sorts of dizzying and wonderful investigations. I know that probably sounds cheesy, but I’m being serious here — this kind of weekend is, on some level, why we do what we do, including put up with so much else that is far less immediately rewarding and also downright sucktastic, why we put up with crappy apartments and adjunct pay and cobbling together fellowships and writing this damn dissertation and (in my case) four hours on New Jersey transit (including an hour on the not-so-scenic platform in Rahway, due to a somewhat unforgivable quirk of scheduling) — we do all of that so we can have weekends like this one.

*Does this mean that I will be restarting the Poem of the Week? Yes, it’s still a dream of mine. Right now the week-ness of my weeks is sort of impossibly fragmented by factors  largely outside my control and I have a lot of displacement coming up in the near future — traveling in April and apartment hunting / hopefully moving in May. But the intention is there.

 

On not actually liveblogging and other reflections on #MLA09

Hello from Central New Jersey, where I’m at my partner’s house watching it snow while one of his cats purrs on my lap. (In this sense, I am, perhaps, having a very similar experience as that of Rosemary Feal, a.k.a. @mlaconvention.)

So we tried to liveblog but it only kinda worked. Part of the problem, of course, was that most of the panels that Mia and I attended were in the Marriott or the Loews, neither of which had free wi-fi. So a lot of the synchronicity couldn’t happen and, even when it could, it felt a bit awkward to do so — as Mia discovered in the middle of the “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” panel. On the other hand, even if I had the technological capability to, say, tweet during panels, I’m not sure that I would have. It takes me forever to get something typed out on my iPod Touch, and I admit that I would have felt kind of awkward, especially in panels where there weren’t that many people to begin with. I suppose that I am old fashioned in my preference to take notes in my Moleskine (despite the vague sense of affectation) — not because I privilege non-digital writing, but simply because this is the inscription technology (if you will) that works best for me in this context.

I do plan to type up some of my thoughts in the coming day/days because although I wasn’t blogging my real-time notes, I was definitely thinking about at least some of these notes as eventually informing a more public post. One thing that Twitter has done for me is add what may be another level of self-narration to my experience of the world — even when I’m not twittering I am often thinking of how this might be tweeted — though I might in turn argue that tweeting isn’t exactly the same thing as narrating.

All in all, I think it was a great convention. Definitely smaller than the ones I’d experienced previously (Philly in 2006; Chicago in 2007), but less fraught than I was expecting it to be. I had a conversation with someone who said, essentially, “the rewards of the profession are so small that it’s not worth selling my soul, doing something I don’t believe in,” and I think that’s a really wise view of the whole thing. I almost feel less stressed out about the  job market for next year, at least in the sense that I will be better than I am now (even if the market isn’t).

One of the things that has been on my mind for the last couple of days (and that I may try to work out here) is what going to MLA can reveal about my own scholarly identity. I joked that, although I’m a Victorianist (more or less), I go to MLA to pretend to be a Romanticist and to have obsessive conversations about Peanuts. The book exhibit finds me looking longingly at the more theoretical offerings of presses like Stanford, Duke, Fordham, and Continuum, even as I hope that my future lies with publishers with strong 19th century offerings. It’s possible that some of my angst on the first day and a half was a result of this field anxiety, particularly since this was my first MLA as part of the ABD crowd — back in 2007 I was still pre-orals. On the one hand, I was able to see how far I’ve come in terms of the thinking I’ve been doing about my field and my dissertation; on the other, it did also confirm the sense I’ve had for awhile now that I’ve become more narrow in my interests than I want to be — particularly in the last, say, year and a half. It’s probably time for me to start expanding again, keeping up a bit more with theory, reading books published after 1900, maybe trying to write about Snoopy when the inspiration strikes, making room for creative work. It was so good to be excited about all this again — 2009 (as I’ve mentioned before) was the year where a lot of it stopped being fun.

Incidentally, my most productive hour at this year’s conference began at 11 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mia fortuitously found herself at someone else’s department party and invited me to meet one of the biggest scholars in my field. There’s something truly wonderful about not being the only person in the room geeking out over Victorian poetry, and I’m very much looking forward to attending this conference in March. And, speaking of geeking out over Victorian poetry, I may have also talked myself into resuming the Poem of the Week posts once I get back from my vacation.

Am going to hop off the blog machine for now, but just for my own memory (and public accountability/shame), I do intend to write up some thoughts on the following:

• The “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” panel — especially the question of what we talk about teaching when we talk about teaching literature and how suspension might help us rethink the hermeneutics of suspicion vs. reparative reading debate
• Notes from other panels — probably just random unconnected highlights
• One other thing that I can’t for the life of me remember now, possibly because it is hard to think with a cat purring on one’s lap.

I also clearly need a lesson in how to write short blog posts. This  may also be why I’m a poor twitterer. (Though I do have a number of new followers there from my indiscriminate tagging.)

Anyway. Bye for now and happy new year all.