K-SAA at MLA 2018: Interviewing Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, and Susan Wolfson

At the beginning of the year, the K-SAA-sponsored panel 'Romantics at 200: 2018 Reads 1818' took place at the MLA Convention in New York City, where three exciting papers were delivered by Professors Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, and Susan Wolfson. The K-SAA have asked each speaker to reflect upon their papers in three short written interviews. Ferguson discusses her talk 'Hazlitt’s people: 1818 and 2018', thinking about Hazlitt's position as a public speaker before talking about his appreciation of nature poetry. Galperin considers his paper 'Taming Austen: 1817-21 and 2018?', focusing on Mansfield Park as a novel 'sharply divided between a dogged endorsement of its heroine’s rise, abetted by the Cinderella-like story in which Fanny is immured, and a fascination with quotidian contingency'. Susan Wolfson looks back at her paper 'The Accidental Anthologies of 1818: Endymion, Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III and IV', considering Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys as unintentional creators of a new-kind of poetic genre.  'Romantics at 200: 2018 Reads 1818' at the MLA convention in New York City, January 2018. Frances FergusonYou opened your paper by describing Hazlitt as the TED talker of his day, commenting upon his role as public lecturer and Romantic intellectual. How does Hazlitt’s public defence of poetry speak to contemporary concerns surrounding the importance or irrelevance of the arts and humanities?When the MLA decided to open the panel '2018 Reads 1818' to the public, I was delighted: Hazlitt’s Lectures on English Poetry, which I would be talking about, had seemed to me one sustained lesson on the kind of difference that poetry might make to audiences and on the kind of difference that audiences might make to poetry.Because the announced topic framed the panel in terms of calendar years, the chance to participate in the panel felt like an assignment. It drew me away from work I’ve been doing on the late eighteenth century and the earlier part of the Romantic era and prompted me to engage with Hazlitt’s Lectures, a text that I had never wrestled with before. Knowing that I could not qualify as an expert on Hazlitt meant that I kept comparing my own situation to Hazlitt’s, someone who works up one short talk (in my case) or a course of lectures (in his). What we now think of as literary criticism did not exist as an academic discipline at the time that Hazlitt was drafting his lectures, so he was not situating his own observations in relation to literary expertise in the schools. Instead, he analyzed the things that poetry offered to all its readers and hearers, and evaluated contemporary poetry in terms of its attentiveness to the interests and capacities of readers and auditors. Jon Klancher’s work on the lectures delivered at the Royal Institution and the London Institution alerted me to the relationship between the kind of lectures Hazlitt presented and events we’re familiar with today—reading that takes place outside of university settings in which everyone who shows up to a meeting of a book club, a talk at a public library, or a similar event is part of a volunteer audience.Hazlitt, I think, takes the full measure of the importance of such an audience. His lectures evidently were crowd-pleasers; people attended week after week. Instead of talking down to his audience, he registered the difference that it made for poets to make common cause with their audience rather than with other poets. He vigorously praised the poetry of his own time for understanding the significance of nature poetry. For he saw Romantic nature poetry as a direct repudiation of the poetic elitism that led poets to cease to be able to see the natural world in terms that hadn’t been provided by poetic tradition and to describe it only with time-honored epithets. For him Romantic nature poetry did not involve a retreat from anyone’s experience. Instead, it was what Wordsworth called 'a history or science of feeling'.  Hazlitt championed a poetry that recognized the power of the intense pleasure that people have in their childhood experience of the natural world. Hazlitt may have criticized Wordsworth for being personally standoffish, but he also singled out Wordsworth as the most significant poet of the age. For Hazlitt was endorsing the kind of poetry that the opening books of Wordsworth’s Prelude would epitomize when it was published in 1850—a poetry that drew its resources from experiences so common that they scarcely seemed distinctively autobiographical. The art of poetry for Hazlitt was not, in other words, an art of remembering and recounting stories from an historical past. It was instead an art of memory that acknowledged and drew on its audience’s memories.Frances Ferguson presenting her paper 'Hazlitt’s people: 1818 and 2018'William GalperinFor those who were unable to attend the session, can you explain why you think that Mansfield Park is arguably the most didactic of Austen’s novels? Is this a sense of prescriptiveness, and if so, does it add to or depart from your previous work on Austen which stressed the heterogeneity of her novels and the contingency in missed opportunities?As I detail in my recent book on the everyday (and also in The Historical Austen), Mansfield Park is sharply divided between a dogged endorsement of its heroine’s rise, abetted by the Cinderella-like story in which Fanny is immured, and a fascination with quotidian contingency--the visit to Sotherton, the private theatrical, the interactions of the various characters—in which her development, and the calculating passivity from which it proceeds, are mostly ancillary and, when not, a complete damper.  It is no accident that Mary Crawford—Fanny’s ostensible antagonist and the butt of her moralizing—is (by universal acknowledgment) the most fascinating character in the novel with notable similarities to Elizabeth Bennet. And that’s because Mary is a placeholder for a milieu in which woman do more than say “no”—one that, as the novel tells it, is apparently on the wane but that Austen fetishizes all the same in preventing the young Bertrams and Crawfords from retreating to their separate spheres. These gendered spheres, after all, are ones where women are destined to become moral icons (like Fanny), and in which the narrative—to the extent there is a narrative—is regrettably instrumental in making the heroine’s “success” a signature of value.  Mansfield Park—the novel as opposed to the story—continually knows better but it is reflexively incapable of stopping either Fanny’s “progress” or the prescriptiveness of that story as a vehicle of a burgeoning domestic ideology. Unlike the normative examples of Fanny and Edmund, therefore, and, more schematically perhaps, the prototypically divided Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, the majority of Mansfield Park features men and women together, where the opposition now is in defense of heterogeneity and against developments, both social and in this case diegetic, where girls will be girls and boys will be boys. William Galperin on 'Taming Austen: 1817-21 and 2018?'Susan WolfsonIn your paper, you characterised Endymion, Prometheus Unbound, Frankenstein, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III and IV as ‘proto-anthologies’. What do you mean by this term? How does the fragmented nature of the anthology work in tension with the seemingly unified structures we associate with the poem and novel?I came to this topic from teaching Prometheus Unbound and Endymion, poems in which 'plot summary' or 'coherent argument' is either impossible, or beside the point. Prometheus Unbound seemed a compendium of poetic forms and genres, of themes worked through various vehicles, and for readers of Shelley a gathering of recognizable phrase and tropes from all his works. And for Keats, Endymion was such an over-determined endeavor--his vocational calling card, his working through favored themes and tropes, his exhaustion with the genre of 'Romance' - that it becomes an anthology, or sequential blog, of various engagements.  So what of this effect, I wondered? Is there a new kind of poetic genre at hand - not intended, let alone conceptualized, but apparent in practice? I have a chapter on Endymion in Reading John Keats (2015) that unfolds this argument, and I found myself recalling it as I was teaching Prometheus Unbound and Childe Harold, and even began to think Frankenstein, which I’ve been teaching for a long time, but for the first time in an interdisciplinary course last year, could be illuminated in this way.These are poems that in Keats’s phrasing for Endymion, offer readers a field from which to pick and chose, and to return. I think most readers, even professional critics, would agree that these are poems far more memorable in passages than in the whole. Yes, there is a long literature of critical crafting of allegories of one kind or another, but these crafting efforts themselves seem to be relative performances. It seemed to me that by the time Byron was writing Childe Harold III and Childe Harold IV he had virtually theorized this effect, presenting episodes under the sign of 'Byron' - or 'Byronism' as the master-genre. And that Shelley, in structuring Frankenstein as nested narratives, with iconic scenes, figures, and tropes in repetition was presenting the question of 'The Modern Prometheus' as an anthology of options and possibilities, and in this aspect, and more particularly in its gathering of Romantic-era figures and tropes, issues and philosophies, character and personages, along with its sounding of poetry from honorary Romantic Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and P.B. Shelley, was verging on an anthology formation. I focused this argument, for the occasion, on the long year 1818. I meant something more like my title, 'Accidental Anthology', though I concluded by suggesting that Frankenstein bid fair as the first anthology of Romanticism, a proto-anthology for the later deliberated structures in this genre of publication. The papers from this panel, 'Romantics at 200: 2018 Reads 1818', will be published in the 2019 issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal which you can subscribe to by becoming a member of the K-SAA.