1818/2018 Symposium: Q&A with Eric Eisner
As we continue to celebrate Romantic bicentenaries, here's a Q&A with Eric Eisner discussing the 1818/2018:“The Tax of Quick Alarm” Symposium that took place on October 13 at the Johnson Center, George Mason University. This event was part of the K-SAA Romantics200 events programme, and aimed to 'gather distinguished scholars of Romanticism to explore the complex literary, cultural and political developments of Britain in 1818 and their resonances today'.
Can you tell us about what inspired you to organize this event - why did you want to focus on 1818 in this period of exciting bicentenaries? Your conference abstract explains you are interested in before Peterloo - can you tell us a bit more about this?
Back in the fall of 2017, when we started talking about the possibility of organizing a fall 2018 symposium under the R200 rubric, we were especially interested in the idea that, beyond Frankenstein, some of the most significant cultural activity of 1818 was happening in places like the periodical press or the lecture hall, or in comedy and satire -- that is, spaces and genres that often get characterized as more minor in Romanticist scholarship. Ultimately, this discussion got us reflecting on the idea of the year itself as a frame or scale. I grant the year 1818 might strike some as a counter-intuitive topic for a bicentennial celebration, since in literary or historical terms the year isn’t usually seen as one of those super resonant, turning-point years like, say, 1798 or 1819. Historiographically, the political and cultural activity of 1818 is usually either assimilated to a longer post-Waterloo moment of conservative consolidation or else characterized as a lull time before the run-up to Peterloo. What unexpected conjunctions might come to view if we took the year itself (rather than a single 1818 text or event) as defining our parameters? Would 1818 start to look more eventful, or event-filled? Or could a bicentenary event focused on a year often characterized in terms of its lack of specific character, its non-eventfulness, help us to think in different ways about the logics of commemoration through which we produce the past as object of historical understanding? What insight could it give us into how history or temporality was experienced or imagined in 1818, a year that in much recent criticism appears as the high water mark for what Thomas Pfau characterizes as a post-Waterloo mood of melancholia or even depression, when the possibility of change seems at best uncertain? This latter question was connected to our also thinking a lot about the weirdness of the political situation as we started our planning—how strange time itself had started to feel. Anticipating that our symposium would be taking place just before the US midterms and (as we then thought) Parliament’s vote on a Brexit plan, feeling both alarmed by unfolding events and exhausted by alarm, we were curious about how we could line up understandings of change, or the lack of change, in 1818 and 2018.
I was interested in the line in your abstract: 'how do languages of legitimacy and illegitimacy, grievance and reform, consensus and dissent, caution and incautiousness, limit and possibility echo between 1818 and today?' Following the event, can you tell us how participants answered this question?
A few of the talks addressed these questions of echo between then and now directly, and these resonances between the discourses of 1818 and today were brought out even more in the lively Q & A following the talks and in our final roundtable discussion. Participants drew multiple parallels between the pugilistic rhetorical strategies of the conservative press, especially Blackwood’s, around 1818 and those deployed by media outlets and politicians today, especially on the right: for instance, the ad hominem style of attack, the use of in-jokes and coded references to signal to readers “in the know,” the shifting evidentiary standards, the constant play with “secret” and “public” knowledge, etc. Our symposium came right on the heels of the battle over the Kavanaugh confirmation, and it was especially interesting to think about how “truth” gets adjudicated in public space in contemporary media and in Regency British periodicals. (Several participants observed that, then as perhaps now, the left and center were slower-footed than the right on this terrain). Katey Castellano’s discussion of Cobbett’s discourse of the commons elicited great conversation about links both to recent social movements such as Occupy and to the nationalist, nativist populisms we see emerging today, while her analysis of Cobbett’s writing and thinking during his self-imposed exile in America in connection with Anne-Lise François’s concept of “recessive action” fit with another theme of the day, represented also in Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s paper on Jeannie Deans and Anne Elliot: interrogating oppositions between passivity and engagement, caution and exposure. The day’s discussion was primed by Mary Favret’s amazing keynote exploring the conjunction of ideas of taxation, feeling, domesticity, and national duty in the sentence from Persuasion from which we took our title (in which Anne Elliot’s glory “in being a sailor’s wife” requires that she also “pay the tax of quick alarm”). Favret explored how the sentence links the novel’s thinking about ideas of time, timing, and the regulation of feeling to the notion of taxation in 18th-century economic and political theory, which aims (she showed) at these ideas as well. In our roundtable, concepts from Favret’s talk informed a spirited discussion of the “tax” of alarm as we experience it now — the ways in which alarm is relentlessly demanded of us, the ways in which we also tune out the alarming, and the ways in which the immediacy of alarm might militate against longer-term strategy or action for the longer term.
How did the different talks complement each other at the symposium?
Beautifully! We had a cluster of talks on Blackwood’s from some of the very best scholars of Romantic periodicals around — Mark Schoenfield, Kim Wheatley, and Mark Parker— and while the intersections among these talks were enlightening, it was also interesting to see the differences in methodological approach and focus among the papers. These panelists’ emphasis on Blackwood’s rhetorical slipperiness and in-jokes formed a telling counterpoint to Castellano’s paper on Cobbett, which directed attention to the reformer’s interest in the concept of a clear, transparent and so broadly accessible political language. Orrin Wang’s analysis of mobility, circulation and hyperactivity in the Gothic zany resonated with the talks on the hyperactivity of language in Blackwood’s and especially with Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s paper comparing Jeanie Deans and Anne Elliot as walkers. And in a number of papers—Wallace’s, Castellano’s on Cobbett’s writing from American exile, Wheatley’s on Blackwood’s characterization of Wordsworth in the Lake Country—we saw how very different texts of 1818 explored, from a variety of perspectives, complex relationships between forms of withdrawal, retreat, or disengagement and forms of protest, action, or effectivity.