What Are You Reading?: Orrin N. C. Wang
Welcome to a new series of posts on the K-SAA Blog entitled ‘What are you reading?’
We want to use this space to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic-period scholarship, especially those publications (online and in print) concerned with the second generation of Romantic writers: Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and their circles. Initially we will be asking Romanticism scholars about new and recent work that they might have encountered that will be of interest to our followers, and then we’ll give them the chance to comment on some of their favorite studies in general. We also want to know about what they might be reading more broadly – contemporary poetry, perhaps, or a new novel...
Our second interviewee is Orrin N. C. Wang. Orrin teaches in the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of most recently Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History, recipient of the 2011 Barricelli prize. He is the Section Editor of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series and this spring will also become one of the General Editors of Romantic Circles.
What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? I’ll take “reading right now” to have a flexible temporal character and cite some studies that have been on my mind. One is the ongoing work on nineteenth-century narrative that Yoon Soon Lee is realizing—her recent Representations piece on Maria Edgeworth is tremendous and promises that her project’s impact on narrative studies will be transformative. The other is Jacques Khalip’s Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar. Khalip’s work is as uncompromising as it is necessary, a robust reminder to me as to why I got into this profession in the first place.
Andy Burkett’s book on Romanticism and media has helped me a lot in my thinking about this subject, a sub-field in Romantic studies really coming into its own in the work of Celeste Langan, Maureen McLane, and Yohie Igarashie, among others. Burkett’s chapter on William Henry Fox Talbot’s photographing of Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Bonaparteis as dexterous as they come.
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching? Khalip’s, especially for my own current project on Romanticism, media, and mediation. A number of pieces making up this collection found themselves spurred on by Last Thingsin terms of explicitly forcing me to think about what kind of intervention I wanted them to make. I was also pleased to encounter a number of formulations about media and mediation in Jonathan Crimmin’s The Romantic Historicism to Comethat pushed me further in developing what I want to say about that relationship.
What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your PhD thesis/first monograph/most recent monograph? My PhD dissertation, which grew into my first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory focused on a number of key contemporary critics and their writings on Romanticism: Paul de Man and Jerome McGann, for example. But the other work informing that early project as emphatically, if not as explicitly, was Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. I think of my graduate education as having my head constantly swiveling back and forth between de Man and Jameson, though that dynamic was also filtered through the scholarly-critical Romanticist vocabulary I was gaining from especially two works of my teachers, W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology and Jim Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature. Please let me also give a shout out to Jerome Christensen’s classic 1986 Critical Inquiry essay about deconstruction and political apostasy in Coleridge and Burke. A number of people seem these days attracted to the idea of finding exigency in the present-day contemporaneity of Romanticism—in a not facile but rigorous presentism, if you will. Christensen’s piece was crucial in helping me envision how I myself might try and do this.
What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now? (poetry, fiction, theory, anything!) Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject and Alenka Zupančič’s What is Sex? My colleague Mauro Resmini’s work on 1970s Italian political cinema is spurring me on to get the Zupančič and to pick up the Badiou from the 'to read next' pile which it (among many others) has been in for a bit. Also two works from my Early Modern colleagues that I’m eager to dive into: Jerry Passannante’s Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster and David Simon’s Light without Heat: The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton. Passannante’s work starts with Da Vinci but ends with Kant, so you could make a case that’s actually reading in the field.
What books are on your night table or desk? On the night table: Stanley Plumly’s collection of poetry, Against Sunset, which develops its own allusive relation to the second generation; Eckart Förster’s The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy; Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140;Nicklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman;and Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics.I’m fascinated by the idea of Gegenpressing,which sounds like it could be a reference in Förster’s study or a clue in Dag’s thriller about 1793 Stockholm or some aesthetic concept that Coleridge brought back from Germany, but is one trait of German football that mirrors and reworks the sublime, Ajax inspired Spanish Barcelona style of our aughts and early to mid teens.
On the desk: The Shelley Norton edition, Steve Goldsmith’s Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and Emotions, and a collection of Adorno, The Culture Industry, for the piece on Prometheus Unbound that I’m working on for my project right now.
Read the first instalment in this series (with Bysshe Coffey) here.
