|
|
Romanticism &
Contemporary Culture
Cultural Patchwork in the Classroom: Shelley Jackson,
Tom Stoppard, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling Rewrite the Romantics
Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University
|
|
|
" At first I couldn't think what to make her of. I collected bones
from charnel houses, paragraphs from Heart of Darkness, and disturbed,
with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame, but
finally in searching through a chest in a solitary chamber, or rather
cell, at the top of the house, I came across an old patchwork quilt,
a fabric of relations, which my grandmother once made when she
was young."
—Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl
( Key to Sources)
|
| 1 |
This patchwork of quotations appears
in the "Crazy Quilt" section of Shelley Jackson's innovative hypertext
fiction, Patchwork Girl (1995). The section, consisting entirely
of short passages of this sort, is an intertextual scrapbook of readings
that have contributed to Jackson's text—in this instance, fragments
from a children's book by L. Frank Baum, Mary Shelley's first novel,
an instruction manual on composing hypertext, and a work of postmodern
theory by Jean-François Lyotard. The epigraph may stand as a symbol
of the kind of instructional patchwork often called for by teachers who
want to respond to the diverse cultural influences on today's Romantics
classroom. It is the kind of hybrid pedagogy that results when academic
professionals nurtured on literary theory, cultural studies, gender issues,
and multiculturalism meet students who are immersed in popular culture,
savvy about the new media, and adept at using electronic technology to download
their music, send Instant Messages to their friends, and research their
term papers.
|
| 2 |
Since 1996 I have taught a number
of courses with a "patchwork" design, courses that focus simultaneously
on nineteenth-century English literature and on the strange, misshapen afterlife
of that literature in the contemporary world. These classes range from
undergraduate surveys for English majors on "The Nineteenth-Century
English Novel" to graduate seminars on particular aspects of the same
subject. In courses oriented toward contemporary issues, such as a Freshman
seminar titled "Hypertext: Reading and Writing Online," I include
Romantic-era material, and in graduate seminars on topics such as cultural
studies, postmodernism, and literary theory, I also make room for investigations
of nineteenth-century literature.1
All of these courses are available
on the web, and I will have more to say about the role of computers
in this kind of Humanities pedagogy. These courses stem in part from the
conjunction of my research interests in the two areas, and in part from
students' aptitudes and interests. There are more intellectually significant
reasons, however, for bringing the time periods together.
|
| 3 |
The first involves the unusual historical and
theoretical insights made possible by juxtaposing Romanticism and contemporary
culture. There are odd, unsettling continuities—as well as gaping
disjunctions—between Romantic and postmodern attitudes toward a host
of topics: subjectivity, the sublime, formal fragmentation, science, technology,
the environment, and more. Lately, critics have begun to talk about these
affinities in theoretical and philosophical terms.2
In the classroom, however, it is often more effective to dramatize such
parallels through multimedia presentations or with examples drawn from material
culture—consumer products, architecture, and the practices of everyday
life. Such contemporary media and practices highlight the altered cultural
contexts in which today's Romantic survivals must make their way. Putting
Frankenstein's monster side by side with Donna Haraway's cyborg, the replicants
in Ridley Scott's movie Blade Runner, and Jackson's Patchwork
Girl reveals as much about its discontinuities with the contemporary
world as about its uncanny afterlife. In a historically based class one
must be sensitive not just to the analogous but also to the anomalous. Perhaps
the most important lesson such a hybrid course teaches is that similar,
even identical phenomena can have very different meanings at different times.
One of the chief purposes of comparing works from widely separated times
is to measure the distance traveled, the forces that made the journey possible,
and the consequences of arriving at a new place and a new hour.
|
| 4 |
A second reason for undertaking
this kind of class is the extraordinary burgeoning of contemporary texts
that engage with the culture of Romanticism. Blade Runner and Patchwork
Girl are just the tip of the iceberg of the recent fascination with
rewriting the Romantic era. Looking around at the contemporary scene, the
teacher confronts a bewildering array of allusions to Romanticism, a hodgepodge
of trivia and clichés, as well as more illuminating images in novels, films,
and digital media. From Hollywood remakes of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley
to websites marketing Regency fashion; from novels set in the Romantic age
such as Richard Sennett's Palais-Royal (1986), Susan Sontag's The
Volcano Lover (1992), Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower
(1995), and Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever (1996) to Tom Stoppard's
witty play Arcadia (1993); from Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk science
fiction The Diamond Age (1995), which frequently invokes Romantic
poetry and philosophy, to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's alternative
history of the nineteenth-century, The Difference Engine (1991)—nostalgic
trips back to the earlier period are a major growth industry today.3
|
| 5 |
Classes using such material often require modifying one's usual teaching
approach. Generally, one will not want to include more than one or two
contemporary texts, unless one is willing to give up the focus on the
prior century and pursue a topic that crosses entirely between eras. For
teachers who are thinking of adding contemporary material to their Romantics
course, I have three recommendations to offer. I will key each point
to a brief discussion of a contemporary text that I have found to work
well when teaching the nineteenth century.
[Note: Subscribers of The Chronicle of Higher Education
can read an article
about this essay, published on Friday, March 22, 2002.]
|