Public Language?

I suppose this post marks my triumphant return to the blogosphere – I’ve been out of commission working on a project that left me with little time for contemplating the 18th C. self or anything else.

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, who posted a bit of written text on his facebook page.  He later made some comments about how he noticed that, without asking for feedback or advice on what he’d written, people had provided feedback and comments.  When I asked him about this, he told me that he believes, and the training he’s had indicates, that unless people directly ask for advice and feedback, they likely do not want advice or feedback on what they’ve provided.  It’s an interesting point, but it makes me believe that maybe he has a conception of public discourse that I cannot even fathom.  When I make a post, I offer it for public consumption, and understand that part of public consumption is that people will provide feedback.  A public post like this, or like the one he made, in my mind, is a invitation to comment – you put it out there, I think, because you want feedback or advice, or even if you don’t want feedback or advice, you can’t be surprised if you get it.  I liken it to having a conversation with a good friend who studies in a completely different field.  When I talk to her about something I’m working on, that, in my mind, is an acknowledgment that, should she have any advice or input or feedback or critique of my idea, my opening up the door to it in the first place invites her comments.  I never feel like she waits for me to ask her for her feedback, if she has something to say, she says it.  The same, I think, rings true for our less academic and more private conversations.  If I go out of my way to discuss something with her, and she has input, then I think I’ve created a space for her to provide that feedback or input or advice.  There must be a way for us to implicitly ask for feedback without being forced to say “now I would like some feedback”.  In a scholarly context, if I never tell anyone about my ideas, then no one has a right to comment on their validity.  The second I present that paper, or teach that class, or whatever, I’ve given my ideas over to the public, and the public has a right to respond.

It’s just interesting that someone can have a completely different idea of what posting something in a public forum is for.  He maintains that he was simply supplying some information he’d been asked for by several people, for them to do with as they will.  It’s interesting that you would enter something into a public forum, but not want a public discussion of it.  It’s almost counter-instinctive to me, and yet he clearly believes that our society is spending so much time advising and not enough time just listening.  He might be right, but  part of listening is to actively engage with what’s being said, though I do agree with him that sometimes, when that feedback is unhelpful or  mean-spirited, it might be best just to keep our mouthes shut.   It seems that if he wants us to spend more time listening, he would want to start by spending time listening to what people are saying about what he says, rather than not asking for feedback on his ideas.

Ask, and ye shall recieve. . .

In reference to a recent request, here’s the information on Michael McKeon’s article on Dror Wahrman’s Making of the Modern Self.

McKeon, Michael, Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 – Volume 45, Number 3, Summer 2005, pp. 707-771.

On McKeon on Wahrman

Someone directed me to Michael McKeon’s review of The Making of the Modern Self in Studies in English Literature, and I wanted to put a few things up in reference to McKeon’s review.

I’m not going to lie, I was having some issues with Wahrman’s work – I think he’s right when he talks about identity being a bit more unstable in the early 18th century than it was/is in later eras, but I certainly was having a hard time with his declaration that identity was so unstable, and eighteenth-century people were not considering it, to the point that they actually believed that people transformed into an identity that matched their dress (hence my earlier post about the fake marriages and fake priests). McKeon has this to say:

“When the Earl of Shaftesbury, Smtih, and James Boswell look within themselves and posit, in the interiority of the self, two distinct dimensions of selfhood, Wahrman inexplicably indicts them of believing in the literality of that distinction and of failing to meet the standard of interiority because they attribute the constitution of the self to external forces…Nor is it any part of Wahrman’s understanding that the very impulse to inquire into the nature of personal identity in the way that begins in earnest with Locke is itself the most evident sign that interiority has become an explicity postulate in English culture” (717)

McKeon’s analysis highlights a part of Wahrman’s argument that I found the most bizarre (McKeon calls this ‘baffling”). That internal experiments are not capable of yielding results that posit a stable internal self might be true of the eighteenth century. It is not true, however, that external knowledge and social experience fails as a determiner of identity.

McKeon continues:

“I think it makes a good deal more sense to understand that the modern category of individual and interior selfhood emerges in dialectical relation with the category of collective and external society. In fact, it is the dawning awareness that the determinant force of the external is not divine but human, not absolute and pre-ordained but contingent and social, that enables an awareness of the self as something that may be separated out from what need no longer be seen as the immutable cause of all effects…” (718).

McKeon also discusses the problems he has with Wahrman’s conception of the early novel – that Wahrman “ignores all counterevidence not only in the early novel itself, but also in the early theory of the novel” that characters are not, as Wahrman argues “universal types” (717).

I know that Wahrman’s book won an ASECS award for book of the year; this is why I find his work so perplexing. It also brings to mind an important issue that I face as a scholar – how do I evaluate a work as important, or interesting, or good, when it has so many flaws? How do I look past the unfortunateness of Wahrman’s mistakes, to find the things in his book that valuable? Do I simply say to myself “Well, okay, he goes a bit overboard, he makes a lot of generalizations that don’t stand up against the evidence, but he’s likely right when he notes a shift, even if I’m not sure his proof is solid?” I guess this is where my own knowledge of the time period has to come in; I guess this is why we read so many books on the same things. I feel this same confusion around other “important” texts – Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, which to me feels somewhat forced, and Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic, which is problematic in so many ways. There’s no doubt these texts are valuable, but how do I reconcile that value with their obvious drawbacks?

I think this pretty much says it all…

The Spectre of Sam

It never ceases to amaze me how often I forget that Samuel Richardson, and his novels, were incredibly pervasive in English literature.  I’m reading Millennium Hall right now, and I’m just at the point where it’s revealed that Miss Mancel would have been assaulted by Mr. Hintman had he not died three days before she was to go visit him from a “fit of apoplexy” (Broadview Edition, pg 100).  Shortly after his death is revealed, we discover that Hintman bragged that he would be “rewarded for long expectation, and boundless expence; for he should then, he said, be sure of her person, and had long secured her heart” (101).  Hintman is then overheard telling his friends that though Miss Mancel has scruples and prejudices that might cause him difficulty, his “steward in a parson’s habit would lull them all to sleep” (101).  That is, of course, an indication that Mr. Hintman was planning to trick Miss Mancel into believing that the pair had been legitimately married.

No one who’s read Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa can read this passage without having little bells going off in their heads – the predatory male who is, in some fashion, responsible for the maintenance of a young, innocent woman (by kidnapping, in Richardson’s novels, by ostensible generosity in Scott’s), the planned fake wedding – are all echoes of Richardson’s work.  I’m continually amazed by how eighteenth-century authors, both men and women, felt the necessity to respond to Richardson’s work.

…

On a completely different note, though perhaps connected, I just finished Dror Wahrman’s book The Making of the Modern Self.  I was thinking, as I was writing that little bit on Richardson, how curious the idea that the role of the ‘parson’ can be filled by just anyone.  Considering Wahrman’s contention that to wear someone’s clothes was to become that someone, that this role was so easily assumed by any old schlub that came by doesn’t initially seem that odd.  Except that a priest had official duties, and an official capacity, and though Wahrman seems to suggest that eighteenth-century society would have seen a person dressed as a priest as a priest, this was one of the roles, I think, that couldn’t be assumed simply by changing costumes.  A wedding performed by someone dressed as a priest would, in Wahrman’s context, be seen as legit, because to assume a priest’s clothing was to actually be a priest.  Of course, we know that this isn’t the case in reality at all.  A fake priest can only perform a fake wedding.   I wonder how Wahrman would account for this.  After all, if his argument about eighteenth-century notions of self is accepted, and an eighteenth-century audience would have believed that that David Garrick, while dressed in the costume of King Lear actually became King Lear, then wouldn’t a servant dressed like a priest become a priest?

Okay, wait…YOU have a BLOG?

I’m going to be straight with you: a blog was about the last thing I ever expected to have. You know how blogs usually are, people write about the mundane events in their lives, and then their even more boring friends read them…oh boy!

BUT, I’ve been reading some really good blogs lately (see the blog roll), and I wanted to see what would happen if I threw one together. That being said, if you’re looking for mundane events, you’ve come to the wrong place (though, as a grad student, I could probably give you some of the most mundane. How about: “July 4th. Today I read five chapters of a book. I also ate a sandwich, and watched a re-run of Oprah.”) My intention is to create a space where I can indulge my academic proclivities: namely, eighteenth-century literature and the like.

My plan is to write a post now and then about things I’m working on and thinking about, and hopefully I can get some comments that can help me think about things in a way that either helps my arguments along, or changes how I’m looking at things. Feel free to add your two cents. Feel especially free if you can trace my title’s reference. I’ll post something soon, I swear.