Eric Lindstrom

Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1819) acknowledges “a certain arbitrary discretion” in its subject, turning from the extant play of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (Prometheus desmotes), to a form of creative translation of Aeschylus’s fragmentary, lost play about liberational unbinding, Prometheus luomenos. Possible translations of luomenos include not only unbinding and ransom, but—across the verb’s active, passive, and middle senses—to loosen, free, release, dissolve, destroy, annul, unknit. What could it mean to read Prometheus Unbound as a materially imaginative revision of the richly layered linguistic act of that drama, “the Luomenos”? This field of meanings exceeds liberation, and its provocation helps us account for the fully distributed play of unbinding for this drama, in which the unshackling of Prometheus by Hercules is a brief and perfunctory action. This essay argues that Prometheus Unbound does not idealize but undercuts both the meaning and desirability of the reign...

Modern history indeed we ought to peruse, because all that we wish must be connected with all that we are, and because it is incumbent upon us to explore the means by which the latter may be made, as it were, to slide into the former. But modern history, for the most part, is not to be perused for its own sake. --William Godwin, "Of History and Romance" (1797) (1) 1. "So that's life, then: things as they are?" (2) READERS OF CALEB WILLIAMS (1794) HAVE LONG SINCE DISCOVERED THE novel's core interest as also its salient problem. That problem lies in the work's unresolved fusion of literary romance with Godwin's late-enlightenment republican political philosophy, Recent commentators begin with the growing consensus that no pat shift away from the rational project of Political Justice (1793) is implied in Caleb Williams, A fated quality on the level of narrative voice and plot evidences the author's famous philosophical determinism. Essays and chapters written from such a premise, however, still tend to arrive in their treatments of the work's distinctly literary mode at a contingency that unseats Godwin's earlier philosophical foundation, a strong version of less flexible "necessitarian" claims. (3) Caleb Williams does not so much abandon the ideas of Political Justice as construct for imagination a vexed but necessary role in their delivery: a "literariness essential to its politics" (Kaufman 559) that leaves the novel--much like Percy Shelley's rationalist enthusiasm in The Revolt of Islam (1817)--as a revolutionary effort that actually requires failure so as to proceed with its larger historical mission. Godwin's confidence in reform is tied paradoxically to Caleb Williams' success at depicting the appalling totality of present injustice, or "things as they are." This increasingly dark sense of enlightenment may be instructively linked to Foucault's. In his response to Kant's famous essay, Foucault locates enlightenment "at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history." (4) Both he and Godwin's novel treat enlightenment as an attitude of contemporary "critical reflection" more than as a body of truths-an attitude toward what, for Godwin, must always be radically contemporary when evoked under the heading "things as they are." At once enigmatic and plain, that phrase implicitly asks us to grasp how things are as the means to oppose them and reimagine life. There is a nurturing of ontological inquiry that at the same time seeks to violate reality's prescriptive inheritance. Godwin's novel anticipates Foucault's stance on "Baudelairean modernity," a "deliberate, difficult attitude" that "consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but in it." Foucault continues: For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. (310-11) Godwin too had reimagined the present "otherwise than it is ... by grasping it in what it is." But the name of this effort was not the book we read as Caleb Williams; it is Things as They Are. Kelvin Everest and Gavin Edwards' 1981 essay, "William Godwin's 'Caleb Williams': Truth and 'Things As They Are,'" remains the best starting place for a joint discussion of the novel's narrative technique and its politics, while also proving notable for redirecting commentary back upon the book's first tire. (5) As the author of the first part, Everest draws a pointed analogy between a division on the British Left in the 1970s and the philosophical stakes of early British Romanticism. In either period, "free human agency" chafes against theory and "structural determination" (Everest 129). …

What does it mean that Shelley publicly mourns the death a living Wordsworth in his poetry? This essay argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley's renunciation of a narrow concept of selfhood not only informs, but germinates, his psychological and political principles, and in the process shapes his response to William Wordsworth—not as an “egotistical” poet, but as one who paradoxically and enviably escapes mutability by being ontologically identified with forms of non-life. I argue that Shelley brilliantly (and correctly) attributes this position to Wordsworth's poetic thought through his own poetic thinking in works such as Peter Bell the Third, and that Shelley also finds such an alignment incomprehensible. His construction of Wordsworth is a skeptical dialectician's disavowal of mute or dull inclusion. The essay attends to Shelley's treatment of Wordsworth in connection to Shelley's performative speech acts of inversion: life-death; heaven-hell; blessing-curse. Shelle...

ONCE MORE INVOKING POETRY IN ADVANCE OF SCIENCE--IN THIS CASE prophesying the development of a radioactive decay-calculus that modern biologists call "half-life"--Percy Shelley's sonnet "To Wordsworth" reads as an epitaph for a man still alive. As in so many other efforts of Shelley, the poem's work is to translate a displaced "life" to a new sense. (1) Thirty-some years before Wordsworth's death (more than Shelley's own lifetime), it ends with the line, "Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be." The only way to make an explicit paraphrase of Shelley's clear meaning is to understand him as saying something like "thus having been a force for good, and a great example to me," that Wordsworth should "cease to be in the same way." The poem's main device reverses life's normative test--as Shelley weighs the balance of meaning in contempt of mere physical states--and turns Wordsworth's accommodation, or endurance, of life's challenges into the sign of his exponential decay. Using the argument of the "Immortality" Ode against its author, "To Wordsworth" holds that existence may be preserved at the cost not only of virtue or interest, but of being. When this happens, being is given over to a set of customs that are just dead weight, and a chill ensues "deep almost as life!" (2) Here is the sonnet: Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return: Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These common woes I feel. One loss is mine Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore. Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar: Thou hast like a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,-Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou should cease to be. (92) (3) Finished and published in 1816, and included in the volume Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude, and Other Poems, the sonnet's drafts likely go back to 1814. (4) They have since been lost. On September 14th of that year, Mary Shelley wrote in her journal: Shelley "calls on Hookham, and brings home Wordsworths Excursion, of which we read a part--much disappointed--He is a slave." (5) The weight of this essay depends greatly on what is meant by thinking of the mature Wordsworth as a "slave," and comes to see it increasingly as a reflexive judgment in Shelley's own terms. Throughout his early work climaxing in Queen Mab (1812-13), Shelley used "slave" as a marker of ideological dependency in a manner that pressed a revolutionary agenda by means of a style of ambitious abstraction, yet remains almost careless toward slavery's literal, legal and human, conditions. (6) In this sense atypical of the exceedingly careful vision of mutually dependent freedom and necessity in his later thought, the slavery that charges Shelley's initial accusations against Wordsworth is a loose term whose springiness recoils eventually upon its user. Yet a tactical victory is gained for Shelley's poetry by this accusation. It calls back, and reinterprets, the all too sober terms of Wordsworth's escape from mutability. The sonnet's last line in effect sees Wordsworth's defense against external change as the disclosure of his own changeability. The poem likens change of the latter sort to treachery; and Wordsworth's stoic accommodation is the cause for why he ceases "to be" for the skeptic Shelley. (7) Although he is impossible to expunge physically (like the "rock-built refuge" reminiscent of the pile in "Peele Castle," a poem that Mary Shelley sadly celebrated in her own lyric response of 1825), the sonnet urges the feeling that Wordsworth just ceases to matter. If Wordsworth has deserted the ephemeral state that characterizes all things, then where even is he now? …

Commentators of differing stripes agree that William Wordsworth’s verse drama, The Borderers, both reflects on and produces the post-revolutionary subject of the major poems. Yet since the play was not published until 1842—almost fifty years after Wordsworth’s composition of an initial finished draft, and a few more since the encounters in politics and love in France that biographers descry behind the text—all readings of the play have been tortuous re-readings. This essay renews the implications of politics, aesthetics, and the autobiographical subject. It exposes Wordsworth to France again, placing The Borderers in the philosophical company of Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere. What does The Borderers have to say about current French philosophical theory’s exchange over the terms of politics and aesthetics? I argue that maintaining The Borderers’ anxiety around issues of risk in subjectivation helps to re-open the space of an event in our long moment of liberal-conservative intransigence.

This essay shows how the metaphor of “planting” assumes a cluster of meanings beyond horticulture in the romantic age. I pursue the associative dimensions of that figure as an index of both sexuality and obliquely imperial concerns in Wordsworth and his critics. The promiscuity of this word disrupts a received image of the poet as stodgy, self-directed, and somehow verbally and otherwise chaste. I reexamine frankly moving passages from the “memory fragment,” two-book Prelude and from the elegy “Peele Castle.” At the same time the essay heeds the injunction David Simpson offers in the title of his recent essay, “Wordsworth and Empire—Just Joking,” by pursuing the trace of Wordsworth’s possible jokes and the way they extend rather than nullify his resonance to world-formation. As with the “planted” snowdrops of the Prelude, planting in general as a linguistic maneuver displays limit areas over which Wordsworth presumes an ambivalent control, and may not acknowledge willful desires whe...

"His name is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he is the author of a poetical work entitled ‘Alastor’, or ‘The Spirit of Solitude’". With these words, the radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt announced his discovery in 1816 of an extraordinary talent within "a new school of poetry rising of late." The third volume of the acclaimed edition of "The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley includes Alastor, one of Shelley's first major works, and all the poems that Shelley completed, for either private circulation or publication, during the turbulent years from 1814 to March 1818: "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", "Mont Blanc, Laon and Cythna, as well as shorter pieces, such as his most famous sonnet, "Ozymandias". It was during these years that Shelley, already an accomplished and practiced poet with three volumes of published verse, authored two major volumes, earned international recognition, and became part of the circle that was later called the Younger Romantics. As with previous volumes, extensive discussions of the poems' composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. Among the appendixes are Mary W. Shelley's 1839 notes on the poems for these years, a table of the forty-two revisions made to Laon and Cythna for its reissue as The Revolt of Islam, and Shelley's errata list for the same. It is in the works included in this volume that the recognizable and characteristic voice of Shelley emerges-unmistakable, consistent, and vital.

William Wordsworth's 1800 Note to “The Thorn” – already a key text for accounts of the theory of poetic feeling at the heart of Lyrical Ballads – offers a defense of repetitions and “apparent tautology” as poetic equivalencies for how “the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things.” Building from recent scholarship on the topics of historical poetic affect and repetition, this essay presses specifically for the role of verbal tautology (before exclusively seen as a negative term) in Wordsworth's theory and practice of language. The essay discusses the interrelated concepts of repetition, “apparent” and actual tautology, and the intriguing idea of “tautegory” in Coleridge's thought, before investigating the powerful moment of allusion – The Song of Deborah from the biblical Book of Judges – to which the Note is passionately attached. I evoke historical, and even philological, parallels between the violent transitional world of the biblical Judges and the Lake District at the time of the Ballads. The essay's final movements argue for stylistic and imaginative ties between Deborah (as the “female speaker” who ties “words” to “things” in biblical Hebrew) and Dorothy's role in the Wordsworth Circle. Throughout I argue that a “prophetic” dimension of this discourse is not future-oriented and counterfactual in relation to history, but radically constative in its grammar.

This essay approaches Jane Austen’s <span style="text-decoration:underline;" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Sense and Sensibility</span> through concerns drawn from ordinary language philosophy, developing the other minds problem against a teaching backdrop in which Elinor and Marianne serve as “pictures” of the title. I chart an alternate, minimal sensibility as the capacity to respond to stimuli at all. In addition to the troubling eclipse of Marianne as an expressive subject upon her marriage, Elinor’s opacity as a know<span style="text-decoration:underline;" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">able</span> character is an obdurate weight inside the book. Teleological readings focusing on Austen’s so-called early free indirect style fail to register the appropriately <span style="text-decoration:underline;" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">thin</span> (not “deep”) resiliency of the novel’s dissatisfying conclusion.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously and mischievously begins the notorious Second Essay in On The Genealogy of Morals (1887) with an assertion that ties the proper breeding of mankind to the right to make promises. Nietzsche maintains: “[t]o breed an animal with the right to make promises—is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is this not the real problem which man not only poses but also faces?” Nietzsche’s language challenges its reader from the start to comprehend its various possibilities of mood and mode, rhetoric and grammar: is it a bold statement of authorial values or an ironic insinuation meant to trap the bad conscience of civilized man? More simply, is it a “real” question or a rhetorical statement? The passage loses no time in deploying some of the soldiers in the army of poetical tropes that Nietzsche unmasks as the producers of truth in his equally well-known short piece, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (here prosopopoeia: ...

.This 2011 European Romantic Review essay (a smaller portion of which was delivered at Austen's Chawton House in 2009), introduces an important subject of my research for the next ten years: the affinities between ordinary language philosophy — in Wittgenstein, Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and Stanley Cavell --and the work and play of Jane Austen's novels seen as philosophically intelligent writing.  The project was inspired by Austin's 1947 Sense and Sensibilia lectures, and their acute, comic critique of philosophy's need for perceptual "sense data" to serve the ends of "incorrigible" knowledge.

Limpet "A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. ... I am an adherent of ... the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. ... [T]he hero doesn't look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, a potato."-Ursula K. LeGuin J.M.W. Turner, "War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet" I remember the first academic conference I ever attended as a Romanticist. It was on Romantic Historicism, hosted in Aberystwyth, Wales, in summer 2004, and began its plenary welcome with a rich consideration of the J.M.W Turner painting, "War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet" (1842). The figure of Napoleon that we considered that day was a revenant: diminished, outmaneuvered by the sheer number of reactionary forces and the tide of events, and haunted by a historical reason that itself-on peril of dissertation and job for anyone starting out in their career-was not to be understood as selfpossessed. The hero (as, for example, Napoleon stood always in essayist William Hazlitt's eyes) had passed through the anti-hero stage (as in Lord Byron's contempt for defeated Napoleon, "abject-yet alive!") onto the phase where names as tropes are harder to find.

After reading Zadie Smith's short recent collection, Intimations: Six Essays (2020), I wondered: Is it possible for a writer to think in intimations without being inspired by or indebted to William Wordsworth? Nothing demands that we read Smith's title as an allusion to Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807). But what happens if we are drawn to do so?  The many available meanings of what an intimation already is--which range from a kind of innermost declaration to any form of indirect communication, sent or received--enrich the laterally social regions into which the word and title resonates, and the challenges I feel are being posed to the more traditionally vertical frame of the Ode. Like the word's and the experience's location in Wordsworth's poem, which promotes the search for "the" intimations as treasures to be sought in individual memories, objects, and lines, but also permits the idea that the term denotes the whole poem as performance and record, Smith's title tries to merge non-localizable associations with the sense that only vividly sharp moments ultimately matter to our moral life.

Juxtaposing two very different poets-Claudia Rankine and John Keats-this essay seeks a descriptive poetic practice that responds to our current moment in the long history of American anti-Black racial injustice while addressing the value of poetic work and public feeling in terms of discourses of public health. I reintroduce a sociolinguistic practice of discomfort into Keatsian "Negative Capability," arguing that the outlook taken from Keats's famous December 1817 letter risks becoming a disembodied ethic of skepticism, one based on uniformly available and distributed empathy. As it offers escape into a negatively creative mode of mobile non-identity, this space of being represents a universalized mode of social imagination that draws from, and hence requires analysis informed by, the philosophy of modern racial ontologies and ideas of Blackness. Against the ingenuously "universal" tradition of philosophical skepticism, drawn here from Descartes and Hume, I frame analysis through a fugitive alternate tradition of Black skepticism. Through reading that aims to provide both close thematic comparison and a critical allegory, the essay shares extended discussion of Rankine's volumes Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen alongside the poetry of late Keats, focusing on miseries-not simply mysteries-of knowledge. Rankine's two "American Lyric" works explore the possibilities not only of impersonal lyric but of a sympoetics of misery. This lost situational discomfort of Keats's Negative Capability proves useful to feel and think with only if it keeps reference to "a poetry of and between bodies," in the words of Anthony Reed.

A group-written essay by Emily Thibodeau, Catherine Leary, Kelly Gray, Owen Charron, Meghan O’Day, Anika Gillwald, Jesse Keel, Liam O’Connor-Genereaux, and Eric Lindstrom (University of Vermont).

Jane Austen's readers know that sometimes the only way to get anything done is to argue about it. As readers of Austen's "namesake" (Cavell 124, 188), ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin, will also know, an argument performed incorrectly is worse than nonsense: an illperformed speech-act can backfire, rebounding on its speaker. Here we argue such is the fate of Lady Catherine De Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice (1813).

A draft of the nearly-eponymous chapter of my completed book on Jane Austen, Stanley Cavell, and Ordinary Language Philosophy, "Austen and Other Minds."

"I should like to say: 'If I am wrong about this, I have no guarantee that anything I say is true.' But others won't say that about me, nor will I say it about other people."

Chapter 6, “Emma and Other Minds,” discusses Austin’s critique of certainty in “Other Minds,” and his account of the pluralities of verbal action in the essays “Pretending” and “A Plea for Excuses.”  Austin’s arguments in these essays possess not only cognitive and epistemological dimensions; they are supremely rich investigations of moral thought and sociality: dimensions of life that produce endless opportunity for mistake.  Illuminating Austen’s Emma, Austin’s rejection of the exclusive dimension of certainty driving so much modern theory of knowledge goes hand in hand with his recognition of the epistemological character of social responsibility. Rather than seeing presumption in Emma’s matchmaking, this transmissible sociolinguistic form, I argue, is the serious sphere of implication at risk in Emma.  The novel’s famous scene at Box Hill enacts these dynamics in a tour de force of recursive layers.  The ordinary-language philosophical topics treated in this chapter include moral luck, pretending, and the self-problematizing division (made famous by Paul de Man’s reading of Rousseau) between exculpatory confessions and pleasure-taking excuses. The chapter begins with Austin’s and Austen’s joint critique of certainty alike as a philosophical and narrative goal.  It ends by dislodging omniscience as a placeholder of philosophical value.

This essay combines philology and ecocriticism as approaches to PB Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.


Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1819) acknowledges “a certain arbitrary discretion” in its subject, turning from the extent play of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (Prometheus desmotes), to a form of creative translation of Aeschylus’s fragmentary, lost play about liberational unbinding, Prometheus luomenos. Possible translations of luomenos include not only unbinding and ransom, but—across the verb’s active, passive, and middle senses—to loosen, free, release, dissolve, ransom, destroy, annul, unknit. What could it mean to read Prometheus Unbound as a materially imaginative revision of the richly layered linguistic act of that drama, “the Luomenos”? This field of meanings exceeds liberation, and its provocation helps us account for the fully distributed play of unbinding for this is drama, in which the unshackling of Prometheus by Hercules is a brief and perfunctory action. Arguing that Prometheus Unbound does not idealize but undercuts both the meaning and desirability of the reigning liberal concept of freedom, the essay uses close philology and theory to investigate multiple registers of Shelley’s poetics of creatively bound freedoms: ecological, political, psychological, and erotic. Recalling that Prometheus is a trickster figure in classical myth—an aspect notably missing from the nominal hero of Shelley’s drama—I argue the trickster role moves from character to language. Epimetheus his brother is a figure of afterthought and retrojection, retroactivity, thinking after the event. I end by considering the coimplicating bonds and cuts in Saussure’s two-wave diagram from Course in General Linguistics.

This essay appeared in the collection Teaching Romanticism and Critical Theory, edited by Brian McGrath (a Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons Special Issue, Dec. 2016).  It demonstrates the use and interest of teaching the debated concept of lyric ontology in the Romantic Poetry classroom across undergraduate and graduate levels. It moves from a narrative introduction on Robert Frost's very material practice of "lyric overhearing" on his Derry, New Hampshire party-phone line, to extended consideration of the recent scholarly turn to historical poetics in the study of nineteenth century British and American Poetry. I discuss Virginia Jackson's influential and compelling anti-lyric anti-theory——Jackson's version of the resistance to theory——as it presents a teachable conflict with the Romantic "literary absolute." The essay ends by reconsidering the metonymic linkage between the position of Romanticism and the position of poetry/ literature/ the Humanities in the institution of the contemporary university, and with brief suggestions for lesson plan ideas and student readings. (Post-production note: contemporary American poet Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016] makes for a timely addition to the essay's bibliographic suggestions and also may impart something like a critical mass to the essay's approach to teaching in the rift between poetic ontology and historical poetics.)

This essay simplifies and extends the argument of my 2011 book, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave).  It's the second piece I've published with the journal Literary Imagination--who published my very first essay.  The essay also offers my most cohesive writing to date in honor of the work and inspiration of my PhD advisor, Paul Fry.

European Romantic Review 23.4 (Aug 2012): 415-434.
William Wordsworth's 1800 Note to “The Thorn” – already a key text for accounts of the theory of poetic feeling at the heart of Lyrical Ballads – offers a defense of repetitions and “apparent tautology” as poetic equivalencies for how “the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things.” Building from recent scholarship on the topics of historical poetic affect and repetition, this essay presses specifically for the role of verbal tautology (before exclusively seen as a negative term) in Wordsworth's theory and practice of language. The essay discusses the interrelated concepts of repetition, “apparent” and actual tautology, and the intriguing idea of “tautegory” in Coleridge's thought, before investigating the powerful moment of allusion – The Song of Deborah from the biblical Book of Judges – to which the Note is passionately attached. I evoke historical, and even philological, parallels between the violent transitional world of the biblical Judges and the Lake District at the time of the Ballads. The essay's final movements argue for stylistic and imaginative ties between Deborah (as the “female speaker” who ties “words” to “things” in biblical Hebrew) and Dorothy's role in the Wordsworth Circle. Throughout I argue that a “prophetic” dimension of this discourse is not future-oriented and counterfactual in relation to history, but radically constative in its grammar.

Studies in Romanticism 47 (Winter 2008).  The first of a sequence of pieces I've written on Percy Shelley's poetics of blessing, curse, and (non-) life:  a group including Chapter 6 of my book Romantic Fiat and the essay "Mourning Life." Though the discourses weren't present to me at the time,  this essay should be of interest not only to those work on PB Shelley and Wordsworth (and to scholarship on Shelley's satire as part of his works on 1819), but also to theoretical engagement with biopoetics and the Afr-Caribbean practice of marronage as social resistance.

What does it mean that Shelley publicly
mourns the death a living Wordsworth in his
poetry? This essay argues that Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s renunciation of a narrow concept of
selfhood not only informs, but germinates, his
psychological and political principles, and in the
process shapes his response to William
Wordsworth—not as an “egotistical” poet, but
as one who paradoxically and enviably escapes
mutability by being ontologically identified
with forms of non-life.

This essay shows how the metaphor of “planting” assumes a cluster of meanings beyond horticulture in the romantic age. I
pursue the associative dimensions of that figure as an index of both sexuality and obliquely imperial concerns in Wordsworth
and his critics. The promiscuity of this word disrupts a received image of the poet as stodgy, self-directed, and somehow
verbally and otherwise chaste. I reexamine frankly moving passages from the “memory fragment,” two-book Prelude and from
the elegy “Peele Castle.” At the same time the essay heeds the injunction David Simpson offers in the title of his recent essay,
“Wordsworth and Empire—Just Joking,” by pursuing the trace of Wordsworth’s possible jokes and the way they extend rather
than nullify his resonance to world-formation.

A stand-alone essay I published on the William Godwin novel better known by it's original subtitle, Caleb Williams; on Romanticism as the untimely-contemporary; and on the political ontology of phrases about "things"; “Imagining Things as They Are”; Studies in Romanticism 49.3 (Fall 2010): 477-506

This short essay was published in the Conference Proceedings from the ICR (International Conference on Romanticism) 2008, held in the Detroit area at Oakland University.  It links the excessive ardor of discovery in the detection plot of William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams to the biopolitical speculations of excised/ marginalized content in the later editions of Godwin's anarchist philosophical treatise, Political Justice.  Please message or email me if you would like publication information for the purposes of citation!

This seminar, taught at the University of Vermont  in Spring '22, is a new course preparation; it combines readings in Nineteenth Century British and Caribbean Literature with Twentieth Century ecological writing (or simply "nature writing"); queer natures in W.G. Sebald and Derek Jarman; and a fresh reading of Amitav Ghosh's new book The Nutmeg's Curse.

Full Syllabus: Frankenstein and Climate Change
Course Description Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is famous as a gothic monster story about the disastrous relationship between Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. But the novel is equally disastrous and important as a narrative of global environment: it begins and ends in a world of ice that is witnessed by humans only because they think they can prosper in a time of ice melting. This is a course about that famous novel, an until recently little known geological event (the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption), and the impacts of their networks of interconnection on how we think about both the creativity and the blind spots of the humanities. The indirect impacts of human productive activity, forms of non-human agency, and matters of concern too large or small in scale to see are the big absences in humanist cultural history. Frankenstein, too, dynamically records these blind spots without directly seeing them. Half the world away from Britain, the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia led to the "year without a summer" that set the scene for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. To a startling extent for a Romantic text published 200 years ago, Frankenstein helps us to ask questions about agency and responsibility in the age of global climate change-the Anthropocene-when people are both understood as the cause of global warming and dwarfed by the scale of its danger. In addition to Frankenstein and a select group of related Romantic literary texts (by Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others), we will also read a global history of Tambora (by Gillen D'arcy Wood) and a focused selection of ecological theory (by Ursula LeGuin, Andreas Malm, Amitav Ghosh and others) in this course. We will end the semester with some short works of contemporary "cli fi," or climate fiction.

A course description of a new course I am teaching at the University of Vermont in Fall 2018.  The course windows out a unit on literary ecology and distant reading practices from my UVM ENGS 100 course on Literary Theory.  Further reading suggestions are most welcome, as are any ideas or info about programming for the broader "Frankenreads" campaign for 2018!

This paper was my contribution to a special panel I assembled, "Romanticism and Personhood: Theory/ History/ Poetics" at the BARS-NASSR joint Romanticism conference; Liverpool, UK, Aug. 2022.  This is potentially the start of a long-term collective project: comments and feedback are most welcome!

Against a theory of mind theory that would focus its literary-critical practice on delivering certain, and accelerated, forms of insight, this full-length essay draft argues for social cognition, rehearsal, and play as adaptive values.  It tests and demonstrates these values by close reading scenes along the border of silent and voiced reading in Jane Austen's Emma.

Epigraphs
"I cannot, so to speak, tuck in my head and look around; I cannot lay hands on myself any more intimately than you can."-Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
"That people are different from each other-I still wonder why and how that can remain so difficult to know; how best to marshal theoretical resources for its realization."-Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Affect Theory and Theory of Mind"

I delivered this paper "at" the Uses of Literature Conference, University of Southern Denmark (November,  2021).  It shares materials from my current book project, on James Schuyler and Romanticism, while using the conference occasion to think about attachment as a kind of improvised method in  (my) recent  literary studies, in tandem with Schuyler's own  distinctive poetics of attachment of persons, places, and things. I particularly  engage with the poems "Empathy and New Year" and the uncollected  "Distraction:  An Ode" as close-reading examples.

This short essay (submitted to a non-academic journal) considers in brief but intensive form a single letter James Schuyler sent to Kenneth Koch (Dec., 1969), offering draft feedback on the manuscript of Koch's Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970)

An extended prologue?  A chunk of an introduction of my next book?  This writing attempts to begin to work through and share connections between "New York School" poets (especially James Schuyler) and Romantic poets and poetics.  The conversational use of the poetic trope  of apostrophe also leads me to begin to conceptually question the false and reductive distinction between "figurative" and "descriptive" verse.

The draft of a planned "Interchapter" not included in my final book manuscript of Austen and Other Minds.

Did Cavell get his title “Little Did I Know” from Proust? In a Proustian turn of translation, the French edition of Cavell’s book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) translates as À la recherche du bonheur: Hollywood et la comédie du remariage.

Juxtaposing two very different poets — Claudia Rankine and John Keats — this essay seeks a descriptive poetic practice that responds to our current moment in the long history of American anti-Black racial injustice, while addressing the value of poetic work and public feeling in terms of discourses of public health.  I reintroduce a sociolinguistic practice of discomfort into Keatsian “negative capability,” arguing that the outlook taken from Keats’s famous December 1817 letter risks becoming a disembodied ethic of skepticism, one based on uniformly available and distributed empathy.  As it offers escape into a negatively creative mode of mobile non-identity, this space of being represents a universalized mode of social imagination that draws from, and hence requires analysis informed by, the philosophy of modern racial ontologies and ideas of Blackness.  Against the ingenuously “universal” tradition of philosophical skepticism, drawn here from Descartes and Hume, I frame analysis through a fugitive alternate tradition of Black skepticism.  Through reading that aims to provide both close thematic comparison and a critical allegory, the essay shares extended discussion of Rankine’s volumes Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen alongside the poetry of late Keats, focusing on miseries — not simply mysteries — of knowledge.  Rankine’s two “American Lyric” works explore the possibilities not only of impersonal lyric but of a sympoetics of misery.  This lost situational discomfort of Keats’s Negative Capability proves useful to feel and think with only if it keeps reference to “a poetry of and between bodies,” in the words of Anthony Reed.

“All things are real / no one a symbol”
--James Schuyler, “Letter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum?” (CP, 125).


Seeing and saying "things as they are" was no less a politically-agential act for William Carlos Williams in 1923 as it was for William Godwin and the other Jacobin novelists of the 1790s.  The grammatical poetics of constation does not dispel the illusions of the writer’s world-changing linguistic powers so much as it gets mobilized and swept up in the participatory feelings of change. We might well wonder then if there can actually be a recessive and neutral literary poetics of things as they are. One of the most distinctive and compelling of such “neutral” writing practices in which the descriptive is not immediately harnessed to an agenda — from a writer who read Dorothy Wordsworth avidly— comes from later twentieth-century American poetry.  The “New York School” poet James Schuyler (1923-1991) is often celebrated as a poet whose painterly art-making practices a model “form of attention,” rather than aesthetic formalization as such.  In one of his poetry’s many self-interrupting, dialogic moments (instances of the rhetoric of “epanorthosis”; see John Wilkinson, “Jim the Jerk”), Schuyler articulates a poetics not of authenticated expressive openness but of the description and indication of “things as they are.”  In asking what kind of difference(s) a descriptive poetics might make possible, or possibly make, to Romantic literary studies, this short contribution owes its starting place to the acumen of Daniel Stout and Jason Potts in the recent edited collection, Theory Aside (2014), which understands the interest of theory otherwise than in the perpetual search for “new” concepts.

A long note with an extended quotation from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.  I need to cut this from the word count of the MS of my book project, and am using Academia to make it easier to say goodbye. I imagine that everything is known about Mark Twain at this point.  But I was struck by the story of public journalistic wounding, ritual penance, and surreptitious pride and pleasure, as elements of the story Twain tells about his name.  (Let me know if you have more info on this story!)

This essay is trying to work with and through the form of the critical fragment in German Romanticism (Novalis) and polemical Modernism (T.E. Hulme).  It thinks with the formative and deformational figures of germinative and exhausted fragments: pollen and cinders.

This long paper on Coleridge and the messianic has been finished since 2011.  It's permanently shelved (as often happens when I try to write on Coleridge!), but represents significant care, thought, and labor: the kind of product that perhaps finds its appropriate"publication" terminus here.

This is the extended text of a talk delivered at the Wordsworth Winter Conference, Rydal Lake, UK (February, 2013).  I've published the second half as the essay "Mourning Life: William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley" (in the journal Romanticism), but have not been able yet to gather the first half into a proper form!  The topic and projected title of the materials on Wordsworth and Byron is "Wordsworth, Byron, and the Poetics of (~Rough) Surface Reading." 

The start is an epigraph from John Bull's Letter to Lord Byron and gives a flavor of the texts and treatment.  Comments are most welcome!!

“It is clear that your adversary has never read almost any poetry at all; for he blames your Lordship most bitterly for copying things from Scott, Wordsworth, and so forth, which any boarding-school miss that has read the Elegant Extracts could have told him had been copied by them from the English poets of the two preceding centuries—which any Eton lad, again, could have traced to Greek and Latin—and any puppy that had spent a year
abroad in the Alps would have taken a pleasure in showing him, over and over again, embalmed in that beautiful dialect, of whose beauty no English writer (since Gray) appears to have had the real feeling but yourself. […] Oh! Most insatiable and irrational of appetites, thy name is ambition!"