Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession
Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession
Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession
Ebook402 pages5 hours

Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy. In the last two decades, these models have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, one whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. In Anonymous Life, Khalip goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. He explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 16, 2008
ISBN9780804779685
Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession
Author

Jacques Khalip

Jacques Khalip is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession, and co-editor of Releasing The Image: From Literature to New Media and Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism.

Related to Anonymous Life

Related ebooks

Related articles

Reviews for Anonymous Life

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Anonymous Life - Jacques Khalip

    e9780804779685_cover.jpge9780804779685_i0001.jpg

    Stanford University Press

    Stanford, California

    © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

    All rights reserved.

    This book has been published with the assistance of Brown University

    I’m nobody! Who are you? by Emily Dickinson:

    Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from

    The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

    This Scribe, My Hand, by Ben Belitt:

    Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt, by Ben Belitt. Copyright © 1998 by Ben Belitt.

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

    Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Khalip, Jacques, 1975-

    Anonymous life : Romanticism and dispossession / Jacques Khalip.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    9780804779685

    1. English literature--18th century--History and criticism. 2. English literature--19th century--History and criticism. 3. Subjectivity in literature. 4. Romanticism--Great Britain. I. Title.

    PR447.K48 2009

    820.9--dc22

    2008018554

    Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14 Adobe Garamond

    For my parents, Yury Khalip and Hava Fisher,

    and in memory of my grandparents

    If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.

    THE GHOST TO HAMLET

    What remains, then, except an anonymous life that shows up only when it clashes with power, argues with it, exchanges brief and strident words, and then fades back into the night?

    GILLES DELEUZE, Foucault

    Table of Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Page

    Dedication

    Acknowledgments

    INTRODUCTION - Rien Faire Comme une Bête: Of Anonymity and Obligation

    CHAPTER ONE - Virtual Ruin

    CHAPTER TWO - Fugitive Letters

    CHAPTER THREE - Feeling for the Future

    CHAPTER FOUR - The Art of Knowing Nothing

    CODA - What Remains: Romanticism and the Negative

    Notes

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    My greatest debt is to David Clark, who as colleague and dear friend went out of his way to look after this book from start to finish. I am grateful for his care and insight, and I hope that in some way I have been able to repay him for his innumerable kindnesses.

    I am happy to acknowledge several people who have responded to versions of this book over the last few years. Thomas Pfau, Robert Mitchell, and Carolyn Williams have been generously reading my writing ever since Duke, and I am grateful for their critical judgment and wisdom. Conversations with David Collings, Joel Faflak, and Karen Weisman helped to further define what was at stake between the lines. Jerry Hogle and Tres Pyle were inspiring readers, and I owe a great deal to them for their sustained interest and formidable acuity. At Stanford, Norris Pope and Emily-Jane Cohen have been enthusiastic and exemplary editors throughout. Thanks also to Emily Smith and Andrew Frisardi for help at the production and copyediting stages, as well as Julia Shaw for preparing the index.

    At my new home at Brown, I have found a number of extraordinary friends and colleagues who were involved in making my transition a happy and stimulating one: Nancy Armstrong, Tim Bewes, Mutlu Blasing, Stuart Burrows, Coppélia Kahn, Tamar Katz, Bill Keach, Daniel Kim, Kevin McLaughlin, Rolland Murray, Deak Nabers, Thangam Ravindranathan, Ravit Reichman, Ralph Rodriguez, Vanessa Ryan, Pierre Saint-Amand, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Len Tennenhouse. A grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research also greatly assisted in the preparation of this book.

    Antoinette Somo and Aurelia Gatto provided warm company and administrative support early on. For their close friendships and goodwill, I want to thank Monique Allewaert, Renu Bora, Nancy Johnston, Julie Chun Kim, Alix Mazuet, Jeff McNairn, Julie Park, Stéphane Robolin, Nadine Rossy, David Woodard, and the inimitable Tracy Wynne. With their typical forbearance, my parents and Dylan Duke Morse have lovingly put up with me. Finally, my thanks to Jimmy Richardson, who knows almost everything.

    A much shorter version of Chapter 1 appeared as Virtual Conduct: Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats, ELH 73.4 (2006): 885–912; and a portion of Chapter 4 was published as A Disappearance in the World: Wollstonecraft and Melancholy Skepticism, Criticism 47.1 (2005): 85–106. I’m Nobody! Who are you? is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard College. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. This Scribe, My Hand is reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt, by Ben Belitt. Copyright © 1998 by Ben Belitt. Thanks also to Krista Berga for graciously granting permission to use her piece, Encounter, for the cover. The image is reproduced courtesy of the collection of Louise Martin-Chew.

    INTRODUCTION

    Rien Faire Comme une Bête: Of Anonymity and Obligation

    How does one arrive at this anonymous whose only mode of approach is haunting intimacy, uncertain obsession that always dispossesses.

    —MAURICE BLANCHOT, The Step Not Beyond

    I’m Nobody! Who are you?

    Are you—Nobody—Too?

    Then there’s a pair of us!

    Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know!

    How dreary—to be—Somebody!

    How public—like a Frog—

    To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

    To an admiring Bog!

    —EMILY DICKINSON, no. 288

    This book takes as one of its starting points Keats’s well-known remarks on what he calls in his letters, "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."¹ What man is capable of being, however, once identity is forfeited and actions are neither empirically demonstrable nor conceived to be intentional, is a central concern of Keats’s writings, and the focus of the chapters that follow. When Keats anxiously describes the Poetical Character as not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character.... A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body (1: 387), he summons it as a species of unmoored subjectivity, encountering other identities and bodies while remaining irreducible to either. This residual figure traces an errant path between he and is, personal and neuter, self and other, poetry and origin (that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member [1: 386]). What the Poet is thus remains suspended in the gap between subject and object, with Character manifesting itself as a seemingly passive, transitive, and involuntary force—he or it is, after all, continually in for—and filling another (1: 387). The I doesn’t stand outside of experience, but rather appears, for lack of a better word, as the effect of a substitution: its relation to others is an obligation it is compelled to honor in spite of its impoverishment—an experience of anonymity, writes Thomas Wall in a gloss on Levinas, (an experience in the absence of there being anyone there to have the experience), or an experience of oneself that remains singularly unpresentable.² The anonymity of the poetical character is thus an aesthetic and ethical concern for Keats: his dissatisfaction with identity registers as a retreat from or unwriting of the self-designating features of poetic work, as well as one’s relations with other persons. In this sense, subjectivity revolves as a numinous concept that fails to secure any lasting ballast, tainted by a destructiveness it cannot abandon.

    Anonymous Life reconsiders romanticism through the concept of anonymity in order to claim that, not only have we yet to fully account for the theoretical complexity of the period’s explorations of subjectivity, but the notion of anonymity is a pervasive topic of romanticism: it provokes profound engagements with the ethics and aesthetics of alterity; it rethinks political questions and theories of action that emerge once the romantic subject loses its privileged locus as a will to power; and it becomes a site of discord and difference.³ "The words I, and you and they," states Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them.⁴ The rhetorical errancy of personal address here economizes anonymity as something that cannot be resolved into individuation, and is neither the preserve of negative freedom, nor a mystification of selfhood. What remains for Shelley is something like an anonymous life—a life that evokes a decidedly immanent approach to the poetics and politics of the romantic subject, one whose pronominal negligence, moreover, shares much with Deleuze’s own thoughts on the indefinite article:

    We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life.... The indefinite aspects in a life lose all indetermination to the degree that they fill out a plane of immanence or, what amounts to the same thing, to the degree that they constitute the elements of a transcendental field (individual life, on the other hand, remains inseparable from empirical determinations).

    To speak of the indefiniteness of "a life . . . is to signal an anonymity that resembles what Hazlitt calls living to one’s-self [as] living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it"—a life seemingly undiscovered and yet, at the same time, cannily resistant to the slightest difference that a claim of identity would otherwise make.⁶ The romantic predicament of anonymous life, then, reflects this kind of ontological dispossession or indetermination; it throws into sharper relief the philosophical, political, and cultural crises that contextualize emerging definitions of identity and agency in the period.

    The present book thus approaches romantic subjectivity through its fascination with anonymity as an ethics of engaged withdrawal or strategic reticence. The social relations I trace conceive how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, is radically impersonal and dispossessed. Rather than failing to claim solidarity, such a subjectivity stubbornly resists the requirement to inhabit a social category and remains open to change and redescription. Through close readings of romantic-era philosophical texts, novels, poems, and occasional essays, this book takes seriously the diverse arguments made for nonidentity and situates such arguments according to important cultural changes witnessed by the late eighteenth century: changing definitions of authorship and the literary marketplace ; the development of radical politics in Britain; the politics of sympathetic identification; and the significance of gender in relation to skeptical knowledge.

    To begin thinking of romanticism and anonymity in this way might at first seem a wholly counterintuitive project, and an especially abstract one at that. After all, can an era that is too often popularly identified with a boundless enthusiasm for the autonomy of the self undergo a critical revision under the auspices of anonymity?⁷ Moreover, is anonymity truly a historical category or condition? Is it a concept addressed univocally by romantic writers? And precisely what does anonymity define? What is the difference, for example, between concepts like impersonality or depersonalization as they appear in the writings of modernists like T. S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf, and my use of anonymity as a historically specific notion cultivated by writers as diverse as William Godwin and Jane Austen? From a lexical perspective, the OED describes anonymity principally in terms of the categories of writing or authorship: nameless, having no name; of unknown name; a person whose name is not given, or is unknown; bearing no author’s name; of an unknown or unavowed authorship; "unacknowledged, illegitimate, rare. Anonymity shuttles between revelation and concealment—an attempt was made, reads one entry, to fasten anonymity on Blackwood’s Magazine." Anne Ferry has noted that anonymity only came to prominence as a noun in the mid- to late nineteenth century out of its more ancient adjectival form, anonymous, or anon, which designated a nameless piece of writing. It subsequently came to describe a writing freed of personality, as well as the conditions of urban life.⁸ At the very least, anonymity is caught between the page and the street, the authorless work and the selfless crowds, and at first glance, it seems to be best explored in terms of the socio-historical materialities that produced it as a powerful cultural concept. Like a covering or disguise—for example, Rousseau’s ring of Gyges, Wordsworth’s Coat of Darkness—anonymity spreads imperceptibly; it is always a discursive affair, and thus risks being defined at those moments when it wishes to stealthily evade conceptual detection. Anonymity gestures to a fugitive, orphaned life: it abjects and disowns all persons, places, and things it qualifies.

    While my book recognizes these approaches, it also emphasizes another line of thinking that is irreducible to sociological inquiry. I argue throughout that romantic literature, culture, and philosophy were invested in forms of anonymity that released one from the duty to make an appearance in the world,⁹ as Mary Wollstonecraft called it—that is, romantic constructions of impoverished subjects, absented from social recognition and self-display, became instances of new potentialities that found ethical and aesthetic value in projects that maintained the anonymous as anonymous, in stark opposition to the logic of personhood. Because my own deployments of anonymity throughout the book are guided not only by the terms under which romantic writers imagine, construct, and espouse anonymity, but the insights of contemporary theorists and philosophers who value the impersonal as an ethical art, I use the term with necessary suppleness, and often interchangeably with other terms like impersonality, nonidentity, or depersonalization. For example, as Sharon Cameron has brilliantly argued in her book, Impersonality : "One way of approaching impersonality is to say it is not the negation of the person, but rather a penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the particular. Impersonality disrupts the elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human distinctiveness. Or rather, we don’t know what the im of impersonality means. ¹⁰ Cameron demonstrates that impersonality conceptually works to undermine the very criteria used to define what we take a person to mean, represent, and do. While I fully endorse her theorizations, anonymity provides for me an added terminological advantage: it is sufficiently capacious to include not only philosophical paradigms (disinterest), affective states (sympathy and melancholy), and forms of writing (impersonal narrative, the nonconfessional lyric) that intimate nonidentity, but it can also gesture to an experience of being-in-the-world that is renunciatory in varying degrees, but not paradigmatically ascetic in the way in which impersonality can appear, tending often toward a disciplined eradication of the personal. Additionally, anonymity evokes different types of social prevarication—hiddenness, secrecy, deceit, theatricality—and thus implies that the ethics of disclosure and concealment are of a piece: they involve wider cultural, philosophical, and political claims about the ways in which the permeable I or nonself" withdraws from the transparency of the public sphere, as well as continues to live and feel such withdrawals. Thus, instead of conceiving the subject in terms of a putative depth model, whose avowed confessionalism sustains the self through recourse to an inalienable plenitude, anonymity serves to remind us of a disruption of ontological certainty, and thus provokes insight into the troubling ethical bonds of subjectivity.

    And yet, before leaping to valorize such ungrounding as a newfound freedom, what should be understood is that the anonymous subject precisely enacts its erasure in a scene of self-address that never can be overcome. As Judith Butler remarks, the act of speaking about oneself is defined by a formal impossibility that underscores the self ’s utter nothingness: The ‘I’ cannot give a final or adequate account of itself because it is unable to return to the scene of address by which it is inaugurated, and thus cannot narrate all of the rhetorical dimensions of the structure of address in which the account itself takes place.¹¹ The I cannot know itself because the discursive patterns of its thought are neither continuous with nor a direct result of any one scene of address that univocally inaugurates it. To think of such an I as self-contained or intellectually replete might risk positing an overdetermined presence of mind, or more drastically, a paranoid self-awareness. Indeed, in the section On Observing Oneself from the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant warns "against occupying ourselves with spying out the involuntary course of our thoughts and feelings and, so to speak, carefully recording its interior history. This is the most direct route to Illuminism and Terrorism, by way of the confusion caused by alleged inspirations from on high and powers flowing into us, by none of our doing, from some unknown source."¹² Kant is mindful here of the subtle distinction between critically turning the self in upon itself, and the terrors of an interiority so rigorously policed that it materializes as the effect of those supposedly external terrors meant to obliterate it through the forces of spectacle and self-disclosure. Echoing countless late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reflections on subjectivity which attempt to describe the subject in ways that countervene philosophies of causation, Kant’s point is that to ascribe cause to subjectivity would not only constrain thought: it would materialize it as the instrument of a brutal determinism.

    What I refer to as the anonymous life of romantic subjectivity specifically seeks to counter mildly secularized or logical accounts of personal action and responsibility that deem the subject to be visible through a chain of evidentiary facts and events. As Hazlitt scrupulously remarks, the self which we project before us into it . . . is but a shadow of ourselves . . . a body that falls in pieces at the touch of reason or the approach of inquiry.¹³ This shattered self of the Enlightenment is a temporal figure that betrays its own virtuality—in other words, self is a projection of being that dubiously authorizes itself as it falls apart in the very act of authorization. The galvanizing force of enlightenment in this case blasts the figure meant to embody and enable those effects, and it is in this dizzying convergence of illumination and shadow, self and other, epistemology and ontology, ethics and aesthetics, that subjectivity takes place, in what Thomas Pfau describes as the fundamental hiatus separating self-consciousness as a synthetic construct of purely positional value from a consciousness-of-self that could effectively know and recognize the synthetic unity implied by the former.¹⁴ The subject’s inability to claim a proper knowledge of itself renders it a belated remainder of historical cognition, or that form of light or illumination that comes to cast identity as but a shadow of ourselves. In this case, the anonymous subject doesn’t merely embody reflexive consciousness tout court; rather, it figures for the problem of identity’s (im)possibility of ever fully coinciding with its conceptions of itself.¹⁵

    For Hazlitt, the self isn’t spun out to represent the accumulative product of endless metaphoric substitutions—it is but a particular of the more general ourselves, lost in a crowd of other selves to which it bears an ethical obligation. In other words, there can be no self without selves, no sense of the one without the many, of the individual outside the group, or of a subjectivity without a heterogeneity. This is why Hazlitt conceives subjectivity as fundamentally unknown or yet-to-be-known. According to this argument, the subject is unable to ground itself through its recollections because the past represents an imperfect index of the subject: the latter is the residue left behind by the conclusion of events, and thus is distinct from the risks of the future. However, it is precisely because we cannot claim to control or be in full possession of our actions toward others, because what we do or say in relation to other persons cannot fully determine us as active agents, that Hazlitt evokes subjectivity as virtual in all the richness of the word: at once simulated and ethical.¹⁶ In this sense, anonymous agency might be conceived as an anachronism, as Jerome Christensen has described it—the potent icon of the past’s incapacity to coincide with itself, to seal itself off as a period or epoch or episode with no or necessary consequences for our time. Anachronism is the herald of the future yet unknown. ¹⁷ Anonymous being is anachronistic because it evokes an existence whose untapped power keeps it, as it were, always temporally unfinished and suspended, not knowing what it is, and what it will be.

    To begin thinking of romantic subjectivity in this way is, to be sure, substantially different from the critical traditions that support the kind of paradigmatic model of self-sufficient and protectively enclosed expressivity that rings true in certain instances (for example) of Wordsworth, who writes in the prospectus to The Recluse that his

    voice proclaims

    How exquisitely the individual Mind

    (And the progressive powers perhaps no less

    Of the whole species) to the external World

    Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too—

    Theme this but little heard of among men—

    The external World is fitted to the Mind. (62–68)¹⁸

    The plot is certainly a familiar one: Mind and World form a complicity that enables the kinds of articulations of selfhood, autonomy, and interiority that The Prelude prescriptively instantiates as its project—a project that reorganizes and recognizes poetry (baldly alluded to in the fits that resonate with the act of fitting) as confessional, systematic, and obliquely referential. As Charles Rzepka has argued, our traditional formulation of romantic subjectivity is the self as mind, with consciousness ever expanding in proportion to identity’s gradual interiorization. ¹⁹ To think of identity as wholly inside, then, defines it as (a) mystical, perfectly immune to empirical verifiability; and (b) essential in the sense that the regulation of affective expression corresponds to an interiority of fathomless depth .²⁰

    And yet, it isn’t difficult to perceive the faults with such a standard account of the periodization of romantic subjectivity. At the very least, one can hear the extent to which Wordsworth does, in fact, reveal in critical detail his own profound affiliations with the philosophical understandings of anonymity that were to emerge with a distinct tenor and force in the later writings of Keats, the Shelleys, Austen, and Hazlitt. A tranquilising spirit presses now/On my corporeal frame, confesses Wordsworth in The Prelude,

    so wide appears

    The vacancy between me and those days

    Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

    That musing on them, often do I seem

    Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

    And of some other Being. (2.28–33)²¹

    The disinterested gaze of the poet hovers here between an empirical attentiveness and an anxious selflessness, and reflects over the perplexities of somehow inhabiting an attenuated form of Being that cannot quite be reassembled or authored. My own readings of anonymity acknowledge this singular fault line or crisis point in romantic thought, and rather than hinting at an uninterrupted sense of development from first- to second-generation romanticism, I explore the possibility that writers like Hazlitt, Keats, and the Shelleys begin to ponder the possibilities that already inscribed a certain kind of radical romanticism that was earlier at work, but with the significant difference that, for them, the spooky vastness of interiority is by no means to be treated anymore as a testament to self-empowerment and autonomy. Strikingly, late romantics perceive the subject to be as vacant as Wordsworthian being: an illusion or ideology of heroism in a post-Waterloo society that is all too aware of its historical distance from and loss of an individualism that is at its core deeply inauthentic, one that is bankrupt and seems to hang onto power with an atrophied grasp that resembles Regency politics in Shelley’s England in 1819:

    An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

    Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

    Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

    Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

    But leechlike to their fainting country cling

    Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. (1–6)

    In this poem, the court is blighted by its adherence to a self-governing right of might, a right that self-destroys in the same instant as the court in turn systematically inflicts a horrifying violence on the populace, starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field (7). Shelley’s sonnet forcefully exposes what Leo Bersani has critiqued as the redemptive spirit of modernity, the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that may account for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements.²² The illusion of self-mastery presumes that the self is to be upheld through the violence of a perpetual sacrifice, and in so doing, it denies the existence of different modes of being that might forestall or simply abstain from the kinds of acts of self-appropriation that define the ethics of otherness in the age of Empire.

    One of the subarguments of this book is that second-generation romanticism cultivated projects that involve radical aesthetic, political, and ethical breaks with the traditional theories of identity and agency we have erroneously ascribed to the romantic subject. I also suggest throughout that the sophistication of these late romantic critiques of agency evidences their anticipation of and enduring dialogue with contemporary theories of alterity, which often employ anonymity in ways that evoke a romantic provenance. For writers like Levinas and Blanchot, for example, subjectivity is obliged to attend to the ontological losses that precede and upset all identitarian claims—an otherness that obliges subjectivity to ethically respond despite its experience of what Levinas will describe as "a positing of the self as a deposing of the ego, less than nothing as uniqueness, difference with respect to the other as non-indifference."²³ If there is a pressing critical need to continue rethinking romanticism as a project that is something more than a skeptical extension and subsequent critique of Enlightenment thought, and certainly more than an era marked by economic, political, and social transitions that reach well into the Victorian and twentieth centuries—in other words, if our interest in romanticism is to be something more than a documentary curiosity, it is important to take fuller account of the ways in which our own theoretical pursuits of identity continue to be shaped by ideas that are provocatively and strangely romantic. As Julie Ellison has noted, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was profoundly informed by a cosmopolitan awareness of the global expansion of ethical and political responsibilities, and writings on alterity frequently recognized the subject’s complicity in the very systems of power it had massively developed .²⁴ By returning to anonymity as a heuristic that allows us to explore the different forms of relationality in the romantic era, we might be better equipped to attend to identity as the vanishing point or nexus for diverse aesthetic, political, and ethical languages that aim to emphasize the value of dispossession. And, in the process, we might also discover the romantic prehistory, as it were, of our contemporary discourses of otherness.

    In the standard New Historicist critiques of romanticism, however, otherness has often been claimed as the guilty shadow cast by the romantic self, and the shape of that guilt and that self have been ascribed to what Jerome McGann has called the scandal of referentiality, or the deliberate occlusion of historical and material knowledge by the ideology of selfhood.²⁵ As the story goes, the I that speaks in Keats’s odes or Wordsworth’s Prelude is a construct that stands opposed to historical cognition—it can only perform and think of itself if it evades precisely those contingencies that have brought it into being. ²⁶ The artistic reproduction of ideology in literary works, McGann argues, has this general effect: it historicizes the ideological materials, gives a local habitation and a name to various kinds of abstractions. When ideology thus acquires a human face, it draws the reader’s consciousness to sympathy with the attitudes and forms of thought being advanced.²⁷ For McGann, each poem is the record of a person or a human face that has been left behind as a result of the onslaught of the romantic ideology—itself a figure for a form of understanding McGann defines as repressive.

    To perceive poetry as reflecting a human face, however, does nothing more than echo Wordsworth’s desire in the 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads to write poetry in the language really used by men.²⁸ Humanizing literature becomes a way, not only of individuating it, but of assuming that texts can be thought to contain knowledge only if they are presented as breathing, embodied, and personal things that lie in wait for critics’ excavations.²⁹ Moreover, the theory of poetry as personification, in McGann’s sense, must necessarily hold onto the same repressive hypothesis of romantic selfhood it perpetually seeks to disown because it is underwritten by the belief that in order for history to be transparent and recognizable, it has to be conceived as

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1