What Are You Reading?: Richard C. Sha

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 third interviewee is Richard C. Sha, Professor of Literature and Philosophy at American University. Professor Sha is the author of three books, the latest of which is Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Johns Hopkins, 2018), winner of the 2018 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the best book published in Romanticism. His new book project, Modeling Emotion: Romanticism and Beyond, considers how scientific models and models of the self shape our understanding of emotion, and the costs and benefits of this shaping. His previous books are Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (Johns Hopkins, 2009), and The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (Penn, 1998). With Joel Faflak he has edited Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?

Marjorie Levinson’s new book on the lyric, Thinking Through Poetry, leaves me gobsmacked.  No one has an account of how the lyric field is able to move the boundary between text and context. No one has a stronger reading of “Frost at Midnight.”  Not quite about Romantic literature, but nonetheless essential for thinking about the period, Jonathan Kramnick’s Paper Minds grants the literary constitutive powers for thinking about the mind. With chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Lacan, Dominik Finkelde’s Excessive Subjectivity rereads the excessive particularities of the subject as the ground for a possible ethics.  In this view, the very subjective particularity that exceeds public duty provides the prompt to the social order to become truly ethical.

Joel Faflak and I are pulling together a collection of essays that revisit Romanticism’s relation to consciousness in light of what has happened to our understanding of consciousness in the past five decades.  Reading the work of our contributors, especially the work of Joel, Rob Mitchell, Jacques Khalip, Marjorie Levinson, Colin Jager, Jennifer Mensch, Alan Richardson, Nancy Yousef, and Lisa Zunshine has been inspiring, not to mention completely humbling.

Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?

I teach a complex problems course, Aren’t We All Zombies?, which tries to rethink ethics in light of the automaticity of our consciousness. Neuroscience has shown us how little of what is called consciousness is available to awareness, but what do our neural mechanisms mean for evaluating human actions and responsibility?  And what does it mean for the legal subject who requires intention? We consider Blake’s innocent zombies as well as Coleridge’s Death-in-Life.  In The Walking Dead, as the gaps between humans and zombies close, what is the human if it cannot be fundamentally distinct from the zombie?  The course requires constantly thinking about how consciousness is framed, and here Jonathan Kramnick’s ability to slice through debates about the mind, and simultaneously to show literature’s formative power for thinking about consciousness is nothing less than sublime. With Finkelde, Zombies provide a way to mark excess subjectivity, that is the ground of the human.

What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your most recent monograph?

There is such an embarrassment of riches right now in Romanticism and Science that this question mandates a kind of Sophie’s choice.  Lorraine Daston’s many contributions are key: one aspires to have the kind of erudition she has, as well as her ability to ask a really powerful, focusing question.  Although I do not agree with Amanda Goldstein’s conclusions about Lucretian atomism, the book is a model of tight argument, and she has changed how I think about Goethe.  I always learn from Robert Mitchell, Alan Bewell, Trevor Levere, Noel Jackson, Sharon Ruston, James Delbourgo, and Robert Richards.  I also can’t say enough good things about Janina Wellman’s The Form of Becoming on rhythm in poetry and as a way of punctuating embryonic development. 

I wish that Jessica Riskin’s The Restless Clock had been available to me before I finished my recent book on the imagination.  That book opens up the difficulties science has for thinking about natural agency in relentless and powerful ways.  The Lacanian Paul Verhaeghe dubs this absence the black hole in the mechanistic universe.

What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now? (poetry, fiction, theory, anything!)

I owe Isis reviews of both the recent MIT edition of Frankenstein, and Sidney Perkowitz’s and Eddy von Mueller’s How A Monster Became an Icon. After that, there are two manuscripts on Romanticism I have to read for different presses.  Since my next book is about the ethics of scientific modeling of the emotions, I am reading Michael Weisberg’s Simulation and Similarity, Scott Page’s The Model Thinker, and Catherine Malabou’s The New Wounded, a book that I wish was on my desk when I wrote Perverse Romanticism.  Her turn to “cerebrality”—the brain’s traumatic vulnerability to plasticity and damage that makes the psyche indifferent to its own drives—and away from sexuality as the engine of consciousness is both sobering and inspiring, as is her refusal to separate the emotions from consciousness. In terms of fiction, I am itching to read more Rachel Cusk, who is the most brilliant novelist I have found since Richard Powers, Chang-Rae Lee, and Rohinton Mistry.

Which book do you most frequently recommend to your students? Which students? Why? 

For upper-level undergraduates and my masters students, I recommend the following - books that marry theoretical arguments and nuanced readings are rarer than one would think.  Seamus Perry’s Coleridge and the Uses of Division manages to perform both, and neither at the expense of the other.  Stuart Curran’s Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis is both a model of superb scholarship and gorgeous writing.  Frances Ferguson’s short but brilliant Solitude and the Sublime is something I marvel at every time I return to it, and to digest it, one has to return to it.  The late Stuart Sperry and Peter Manning model the best kind of criticism: criticism that integrates the psychological and the historical and the textual in ways that give one the illusion that one has grasped the absoluteness of Romantic intent.

For a forthcoming essay on lostness in Frankenstein, I recently had to delve into Anne-Lise Francois’ Open Secrets, and that book is a total tour de force.  It prompted new ways of thinking about the term ‘abortion’ in the novel.

N. Katherine Hayles’s recent Unthought is a major study that urges the humanities to get in front of the current cognitive revolution.  It is also a book that can teach students how to think, how to argue, and how to write clearly about difficult things such as algorithms. Her argument that ethics now must come to terms with human and machine systems is sobering. Harry Frankfurt has this ability to get to the nub of an ethical argument in mere paragraphs, and so I recommend his books to students who need help clarifying the stakes of their arguments. And perhaps no other book than Frankfurt’s On Bullshit better captures our current political moment, and why we should be worried.