K-SAA Interview with Distinguished Scholar for 2021: Jon Klancher

Apr 25

The K-SAA Distinguished Scholars for 2021 (awarded MLA virtual conference 2021) were Jon Klancher (presented by Jonathan Sachs), and Nicola Watson (presented by Mary Favret).

Today on the K-SAA Blog we are delighted to present an interview with Professor Jon Klancher (Carnegie Mellon University). His research focuses on later eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British culture, book and reading history, and the sociology of literature.

Interview by Anna Mercer and Victoria Barnett-Woods. You can also read a recent K-SAA interview with Professor Nicola Watson here.

What instigated your love of the Romantic period and culture? Was there a particular moment, figure, or text, for example, that really influenced you and made you want to research the era further?

I gravitated toward the Romantic period slowly in college; Blake and Shelley initially fascinated me before I had any sense of the period itself. Powerful as they were, I didn’t at first find it easy to understand what they were responding to. It was during a gap year after college that I began reading them intensively, along with a good deal of Romantic scholarship, and started to grasp the resonance they had for me in those years (1968-72) when ideas of revolution were in the air, decolonization movements were profoundly reorganizing the world, and political protest and literary experimentation were reshaping our frames of awareness. In that extraordinary moment, it was hard not to be captivated by what Romantic writing—long a target of modernist denigration—had to tell and show me about my own time. My somewhat apocalyptic sense of Romanticism was soon tempered and shaped in graduate work at UCLA, where I had the good luck to study the period with four immensely learned and imaginative Romanticists: Robert Maniquis, Peter Thorslev, Paul Sheats, and Fred Burwick.

There has been an increase in interest in recent years in the intersections between arts and sciences of the Romantic period, as demonstrated by your prize-winning monograph, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge University Press 2016). Which areas or topics of Romantic study do you think scholars will be researching and focusing on over the next few years?

Since “arts and sciences” defines the matrix out of which our modern disciplines evolved, there will certainly be many more studies invoking that intersection. The point of my book was to view these realms not simply in their epistemological tensions, but as dialectically interrelated in terms of their practices; I was particularly fascinated by the crossover practices that Jeremy Bentham so keenly articulated in Chrestomathia (1816), for instance, among many writers or lecturers studied in my book. (We need a rethinking of Bentham, incidentally, that is freed of Romantic prejudices; an excellent starting point would be Frances Ferguson’s fine account in Pornography, the Theory.) Since finishing Transfiguring I’ve felt that its most underdeveloped topic—one that doesn’t often attract literary interest—is the “mechanical arts” where the arts and sciences were actually intersecting in the later eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. Those kinds of art so completely disappeared from the literary landscape after Erasmus Darwin that new work in the areas of the Anthropocene will have to reopen their black boxes, as Latour calls them, that were largely closed after 1800. These questions get us well beyond the simpler “literature and science” comparisons that have become quite familiar; I’m thinking of areas like the one defined by a recent UC Berkeley dissertation, Andrew John Barbour, Mechanical Powers: Engineering and Romantic Poetics in the Early Anthropocene (2021).

How does your work on Romantic Cosmopolitanism and literary groups in London inform understandings of literary creativity as a social experience, dependent on interaction and collaboration? How do you see the social basis of literary production in contrast to Romantic ideals of solitary creativity or genius?

Since my work has always been about collective forms of literary reception and production, it has been a little odd to me that anyone in Romantic studies would still wonder how to understand literature in terms of social frameworks. Right now, ideas of social authorship are rapidly merging into studies of networks and collaborative cultural production. Jonathan Sachs and I treated this subject in our introduction to a recent Praxis volume Raymond Williams and Romanticism. For Williams, the old Marxist concept of “cooperation” among workers in the factory could be rethought as collaborative cultural work among strategically defined groups from various Romantic circles to the later avant gardes. For Williams and for us, I think, it is not just a choice between Romantic genius or solitary authorship and a social conception of literature—once opened up, the “social” extends outward in so many directions we haven’t yet fully traveled. Jon Mee has been doing important new work literary and social networks by traveling across northern England ca. 1780-1840 to locate literary production of the industrial revolution—in the more expansive eighteenth-century sense of the “literary”—and this work will be an important corrective to our inability to think of the cultural work writers did far outside the great cities. I’ve taken a page from this approach in a forthcoming essay on the intricate connections between scientific lecturing in the provinces–a realm not really studied since the early 1970s– and the rise of scientific and lecturing in London.

In these K-SAA Interviews, we like to find out what you have been reading, as well as what you have been writing Can you tell us what books (criticism, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, anything!) you’ve enjoyed reading recently? What books are on your “to read next” pile?

After reading, Mark McGurl’s everything as Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021), which is set in the present, I began to wonder how book and print history could be conceived in similar terms, since McGurl’s book is so revelatory about our moment and so suggestive with the potential to think about our digital archives of Romantic works. On the other, more affective end of thinking about our condition, I was moved by Andrew Stauffer’s Book Traces (2020), a study of book history as inscribed in books of poetry published in the nineteenth century that still populate the shelves of our university libraries. Last summer Gillian Russell’s brilliant book The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century (2020) sent me in search of ephemera archives; one guide I came to value is Graham Hudson’s The Design and Printing of Ephemera in Britain and America, 1720-1920 (2008). My other reading recently has tilted toward climate change.Only a few books I’ve read offer a truly concrete account of long evolutionary time: John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (2014) is magisterial in detail and design. I probably should be interested in thinking on local remedies for global warming, but my own Romantic imagination goes instead to problems of conceptualizing humanist time in the wake of the scalar rifts that Dipesh Chakrabarty has made so compellingly in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2020). But on evolution more generally, it’s hard to think of any book more intellectually bracing and powerfully conceptualized in our field than Ian Duncan’s Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (2019)–a towering work of literary and intellectual history.