Thursday, December 21, 2006

Switching to Beta

Hello, all. Another technical note:

I am in the process of switching the blog over to the Beta version. I do not like Beta, as it requires us to create Google accounts, which I think is not good. Part of me would rather just switch this whole caboodle over to Wordpress.com, which I have done (and will make to look pretty, I promise) here. If we decide to move there, this blog will still be up, at least as an archive for the old comments.

The one drawback of Wordpress is that it will not accept Haloscan. I like their comment-function better than Haloscan, and it is spam-regulated. We can still link to the old discussions here, and I will try to import recent comments and those from the Parker discussion, to keep it live.

The decision we need to make as a community is between the following options:

1. Do we want to stay on Blogger and make everyone get Google accounts to transfer to Beta?
2. Do we want to move to Wordpress, where everyone will still have to create new accounts, but they won't mess with your email?

UPDATE: I have decided, we are not all going to get Google accounts and switch to Beta. It is too much of a hassle. We are all going to Wordpress and creating accounts there. Once you have a Wordpress account, email me and let me know what email address you used and I will invite you to join the Long Eighteenth.

WHY DO I LIKE IT BETTER? Just look. The Collaborative Readings information is in an obvious bar across the header, and it has embedded Category links in the sidebar, too. You can navigate easily from post to post and the front page is always quickly accessible. If I'm not mistaken, the pages even load faster, which is a big deal for us dinosaurs still on dial-up.

Once you join, I'll set you all to "administrators" so you can edit comments (like if, for example, you see you've made a typo), check the blog stats yourself (so it's not all a mystery in my hands how many hits we get) and enjoy all the WP extras. I think this will be far better than the patched-together nature of our Blogspot blog.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Thanks for voting!

I emerge briefly from the lightless pit of exam grading to thank any of you who may have voted for me for the MLA Delegate Assembly. I will be representing the graduate students of New York State from 2007-2010. May I not actually be a graduate student that long!

As we've mentioned in comments, this blog may be taking an unplanned mini-hiatus while we all do some deep-breathing exercises. I will probably need some advice about evaluating what are some truly baffling exam results. I only gave the exam, you'll remember, because I was concerned that all the opportunities for getting a grade in my class were based on extremely rigorous at-home and in-class writing, so I thought I'd make at least half of the exam easy, non-analytical questions one can actually study for.

As is par for my class, the students who were already doing well (about a third) studied very hard and got high A's, even a few perfect scores. The students who were not doing so great at the analytical exercises did not study at all (or freaked out, or something) and failed the exam mightily, misidentifying even the protagonists of the three novels we read, naming Samuel Johnson as "A Victorian poet," and answering the gimme question "Who is your favorite writer we read this semester and why?" with "William Burroughs" and no explanation. (Needless to say, we did not study William Burroughs in Brit Lit Survey.) I know my students probably know the answers to these questions—they're all pretty obvious and I have made sure in other ways that they read the material—so I'm guessing it's some kind of intense exam-phobia.

I can't ignore the final results; obviously many of my students deserve to have their grade raised by their excellent performance. But I also feel terrible dropping some of what are already barely-passing grades because of totally botched exams. Sure, these results are probably an effect of poor reading skills, and it is a reading class, so those skills are being tested, but testing someone on how well they understand my questions, as a text, is less important than whether they understand the literature itself.

So this is why I've been away from the blog. Thinking about it makes me want to bang my head against the wall, and though I would rather be thinking about interesting C18 scholarship, my head is otherwise occupied.

I am hoping Parker is able to join the conversation once the CUNY semester is out, which is this week.

Is anyone else coming to MLA? Should we have lunch one day?

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Johnson and Fideism

Although the previous chapter was titled, “The Fideist Reaction,” there were several earlier hints of a “Protestant reaction” extending forward into the nineteenth century. That complete history does not appear in this chapter, as Parker analyzes Samuel Johnson’s works as part of the initial return of fideist art. Although the concept of a divided Samuel Johnson is not new, Parker provides us with new terms for that split in naming the two halves of Johnson’s literary nature—one part is Humanist curiosity about the world (and literature in particular), and one part is fideist skepticism about the value of earthly activities (literature among all others). This latter impulse is seen most strongly in The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas, in which diverse human activity leads to the same sense of futility and exhaustion (with Solomon the representative, non-classical figure of spiritual weariness). This chapter really should be read with the previous chapter for full appreciation of the fideist motifs that Parker identifies in Johnson’s work. Among other motifs, Johnson’s work emphasizes futility, meditation, and stasis. This fideist element extended to Johnson’s perception of his own activities; his literary output stimulated and amused him, but could achieve for him no higher value: “For Johnson poetry (and every art) is a diversion, a toy…and a bauble” (238). Likewise, for Johnson private devotions, though a necessary and sober duty, could provide no sense of certainty, no knowledge of divine intentions. Parker argues that Johnson’s relationship to God, and hence to God’s works, is fideist in a specific and limited: “the form of imagination in which the divine is understood is infinitely remote from sensation, analogy, and all discursive knowledge” (231 n. 3). To seek, or rather linger patiently, is pious, but to expect certainty outside of the promises of the Bible is foolish.

This image of a fideist and un-analogical Johnson affirms the thesis of the book, which is that analogical representations of God became impossible after the Augustans had done their work. The contrast between Johnson in this chapter and the account of Edward Young in the previous chapter is meant to be instructive: one incorporates modes of inquiry despite pessimism about its relevance, and the other is meditative to the point of total absence/departure. The other part of this argument is that Johnson, by systematically (dialectically?) opposing his Humanist influences to his fideist beliefs, was in fact two—creating and sustaining a paradox, to the point that “Johnson was not a man of his time” (248).

This last assertion should be closely pondered for its historical implications. If Johnson combines all of these Augustan, Humanist and fideist influences, yet is not of his time, then how does he come to appear at the end of this book? It seems strange to conclude a historically situated reading with this kind of flourish, which shows respect for Johnson as a thinker and writer but leaves us in an odd place. We are told that “Johnson solved the problem that divided the literary culture of his day”—that is, the problem of reinstating religious expression in art—“by dividing himself” (249). The last time we saw such a division was in the account of Abraham Cowley, of whom it was said “He was one of the first to feel the failure of analogy. …one of the first to reckon with the problem of a necessary revision of consciousness” but also one who “left behind an indecipherable legacy” (78-9). If Johnson represents a solution to the problems created by the Augustans, where should we look for a continuation of that solution? If he is not of his time, what is his relevance? To put it another way, is Johnson a transitional figure like Cowley, a representative figure like Pope, or a revolutionary figure like Butler? This account seems in some ways to lean towards a transitional definition: Johnson looks back to Humanist authors “now obscure” and presides over the revival of “fideist art,” albeit without being able to fully occupy the fideist mode in the manner of Edward Young. I find myself wondering what might be the relationship of this final figure to subsequent fideism in Parker’s account.

Finally, I’d like to add on to Kirsten Wilcox’s final question in the previous post by asking frankly what our own assessment might be of the relative readability of Night Thoughts and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Wilcox asks whether Johnson and Young are “united in their turn against the Augustan empirical project”—if they are/if they are not, how might readability (or familiarity—the degree to which either is read these days) affect our ability to judge the similarity or difference of the impulses behind the two poems? And what then would be the relevance of such a comparison?

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Alex Seltzer on "Scientific Verse" up to about 1730

Alex Seltzer has sent in a guest post in response to Parker's Chapter 4, which is as follows:

In chapter 4 on "Thomson and the invention of the literal," Parker discusses the new objects of poetry: "By 1720 poetry was no longer a basically religious or even courtly manner. It was for the first time the art of everything. It was the vehicle of the fully literal, the realization of the physical and detached nature of things." [p. 137] He then cited Margaret Doody: "Nothing is so common, so bizarre, so unclean -or so grand -that it can't be appreciated and consumed by the poetic process." Doody, The Daring Muse, p. 9].

I have been delving into the "scientific verse" of poets such as Blackmore (Creation), Prior (Solomon), Baker (Universe), Collins (Nature Display'd), Brooke (Universal Beauty). To these I add Thomson's Season's which impresses me as being on a much higher plane and less concerned with the argument by design which was the common theme. My goal has been to extract "arguments by design" based strictly on biological models. The purpose is to draw a parallel between the imagery of these poets and the illustrations of the contemporary naturalist, Mark Catesby. His illustrations of new world flora and fauna have been labeled as the "graphic equivalent of poems." (David Wilson, In the Presence of Nature, 1978, p. 147).

Turning to the natural theological verse of the above poets, we find the bedrock of such poetry consists of example after example of "proofs" of the divine creator's existence as reflected in "the book of nature." More often than not, the poet points out the obvious and conveys it in bombastic terminology. To cite one of my favorite examples, here is Brooke on the architectural skills of bees (a pet topic of these poets) from his Universal Beauty:

Swift for the tasks the ready builders part,
Each band assigned to each peculiar art;
A troop of chymists scout the neighboring field,
While servile tribes the cull'd materials wield,
With tempering feet the labored cement tread,
And ductile now its waxen foliage spread.
The geometricians judge the deep design,
Direct the compass, and extend the line;
The sum their numbers provident of space,
And suit each edifice with answering grace.
Now first appears the rough proportion'd frame,
Rough in draught, but perfect in the scheme;
When lo! Each little Archimedes nigh,
Mates every angle with judicious eye;
Adjusts the center cones with skill profound
And forms the curious hexagon around.
[book 6, lines 191-206]


To repeat, was such poetry consumed, if not by a broad public, then by an influential elite? Are these just faint echoes of John Ray's Wisdom of God? or powerful amplifications that brought "the argument by design" into the mainstream? The very fact that poets were tackling a variety of new subjects suggests that the audience was broadening but that is supposition on my part.

Secondly, is it fair to regard this now as "bad poetry?" Blackmore's Creation was defended by Johnson (Lives of the Poets) but he condemned Prior's Solomon as tedious. I don't know about the others. (Swift's famous ditty about flea's hosting smaller parasites may have been directed towards Baker). I find much of this poetry (to my delight) comparable to the howlers of William McGonagal's Victorian-era "poetic gems" ("Greenland's Icy Mountains"), but he had the defense of being uneducated, whereas Collins' "Little Archimedes" screams that he had a classical education. In fact, there seems to be a conspicuous "show-off" element, each poet trying to out-do the next, much as Swift's "Flea" suggests. Was this sort of poetry exceptionally bad, or merely run-of-the-mill bad? Maybe such a discussion is irrelevant in an academic context?

I've found little on these biologically-oriented poems other than Bonamy Dobree's English Literature in the Early 18th Century. Suggestions on further reading are welcome -both on the poems and the broader context. (Perhaps other pre-1730 poems could be included?)

Sincerely, Alex Seltzer (art historian unfamiliar with poetry) Philadelphia

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Transitional Augustan poetry, anyone?

I promised I would pick up the slack on the "Transitional Augustan poetry" chapter, and have written and deleted several posts that attempted to address this chapter. All my attempts were very bad, so I have decided to keep this as short as possible and hope for comments.

I enjoyed this chapter very much, as it addresses Cowley, whose poetry I often find myself reading aloud in funny voices. In fact, I would say this was the chapter that most directly answered my own queasiness/fascination with the early Augustan. Much of the who/what/when/how of the Augustan shift is described in this chapter, but I admit I required seeing Parker elaborate in the Pope chapter that follows before I saw clearly where this was going.

I wonder if it is a failure of my imagination that I am more comfortable discussing authors who are self-consciously manipulating a dominant aesthetic than those who are caught between two ages, still holding onto the tail of one while they grasp out toward the head of the next. I think Parker does this well, but I did not nod furiously along as I read it (as I did when I came to Pope), but thought instead, "Is that really so?"

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Introduction: The Christian imagination vs. the critical history

Welcome to the collaborative reading of Blanford Parker's The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson! We look forward to a great conversation over the next week as we move through this text, with responses to Parker, Parker's responses to us, and our dialogue with one another. Please feel free to jump in at any point in the comments and/or with posts on the front page. Keep in mind that comments over 10,000 characters will be truncated, so if you have something very lengthy to say, consider posting it to the front page (if you are already on our contributors' roster) or emailing it to me and I'll put it up for you. I will begin with a short response to the introduction, and we'll proceed roughly sequentially from there.

Parker's introduction begins with a reframing of the discourse surrounding Augustan aesthetics as a process of rejecting the Baroque, which he describes as a set of aesthetic responses to four traditions of Christian theology, the mystical, logist, fideist, and analogical. The Augustan, for Parker, is not, as has been assumed by most critics, a return to classical, or even the creation of a "neoclassical," aesthetic, but a slow conceptual divorce of art from the traditional Christian imagination.

This divorce begins with the leveling satires of Boileau, Butler, Rochester, Dryden, and Swift, which mock not Christianity itself, but the imaginative excesses of Christian thought, "the 'acrostic land' of the logist; the maddened, inward 'aeolist' imagination of the fideist; the self-lacerating obsessions of the mystic; and most of all the empty conceits of the analogists" (2). While the critical history of the Augustan period has always marked the move away from metaphor, flights of imaginative fancy, "superstition" and "enthusiasm," and the shift toward a commitment to empiricism and mimetic description, Parker specifically notes that this shift comes, first, as a total rejection of the aesthetics of traditional Christianity, not necessarily, as the writers of the age would style it, as a "return" to classical values. The only way to get to the aesthetic values of Addison, Pope, and Johnson is by first actively destroying the dominant modes of representation.

This move is, of course, never separate from the historical relationship of the seventeenth century succession to the rise of religious faction. No aesthetic movement is ahistorical. "Augustan literature," Parker writes, "was the first great victory over the culture of analogy, memorial authority, and traditional theology, and their classicism is no more backward-looking or authentic than that of Shelley or even Joyce" (7). Parker argues against the twentieth century critical history that has compressed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics so that "Leavis [...] and Brooks [...] began to see the same virtues of figural compression and even conceit in Pope and Gray that Eliot had discovered in Donne" (9). That is, the distinctions that were so self-consciously made across a hundred and fifty years of poetry, that moved from the theological and aesthetic excesses of the "metaphysicals" to the empirically descriptive poets of the high Augustan, have been minimized from the great distance of the New Critical era, and that compression has, to some extent, not been remedied in the intervening years.

The poverty of criticism in the period is partially to blame. Parker notes that the poetry between the late Renaissance and the Romantic eras are not well read even in primary texts, much less in critical ones. He also faults the "too rigorous distinction between the prose and poetic genres of the period" (12) for the lack of criticism on Augustan aesthetics. It has been easy for criticism like T.S. Eliot's to become ascendant and remain, always, on the table when so few have offered to correct it. Parker's extended criticism of Eliot's misrepresentation of the Augustan as a "revolt against the 'descriptive'" (18) demonstrates the intrusion of Eliot's own aesthetic commitments into his treatment of the era.

But while Parker faults Eliot for compressing the Augustan into a modern fantasy of historicized poetic difference, he criticizes Foucault for the opposite—removing the Augustan from its Baroque roots and setting it alongside the undeniably modern. That is, Parker feels Foucault is guilty of being duped by the rhetoric of the Augustan, which self-consciously attempts to erase its own history for the sake of innovation, while, as Parker shows in the first chapters of the Triumph, tendrils of surviving Baroque "excesses" still spring up everywhere in transitional Augustan poetry.

This seems to me to be a book that has the potential to radically reconfigure our understanding of the Augustan era, and to allow both for historical attention to the origins of eighteenth-century aesthetics and for the innovations of the era. I look forward to seeing how you feel this approach could be applied to criticsm and even pedagogy, and I will respond further in the comments.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Housekeeping #3

I have been a bad housekeeper. It seems like a good time now, before our second collaborative reading, to take stock of the status of The Long Eighteenth.





(Click the graphic to enlarge.)


Our upcoming reading will include posts by myself, Dave Mazella, Jen Golightly, Bill Levine, Alex Seltzer, Carrie Hintz, "KW," Shayda Hoover, and Blanford Parker, as well as anyone else who chooses to jump in. (Don't be shy!) I met with Blanford this morning and he is looking forward to our conversation.

Please feel free to publicize this event to your colleagues.