Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following
conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for â€, ' for ‘, and ' for '.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard
Em-dashes have been rendered as #8212
Spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
Whether or not we believe the reports of theory's imminent or
absolute demise, recent calls (from Latour, Sedgwick, Best and Marcus) to move
beyond ideology critique invite us to rethink our teaching as well as our
research practices. This essay asks what it would mean to exchange an emphasis
on "theory" for one on "method." My suggestion is that focusing on method
encourages a cultivation of knowledge as, specifically, a
In the fall of 2012 I taught a graduate seminar called “Romanticism as
Method.” Why method? Etymologically speaking, method
(
Another question to ask regarding the foundations of the course might be: why method instead of theory? In 1986, Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer introduced their
“Romanticism as Method” begins, then, from the disheartening premise that the obsolescence of theory—motored, at least in part, by high-profile spasms of apostasy like Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?”—presents an especially acute problem for students and scholars of Romanticism (Gumbrecht, “Response” 212-6). No longer does it seem wise to justify one’s teaching or research on the assumption that “Romanticism,” whether English, European, or Transatlantic, is integral to theory, because theory itself no longer seems generally integral. If theory is evermore seen as a residual mode of critical and pedagogical practice, how might Romanticism contribute to an important public conversation on the “why” of research and teaching on its own terms? This course is my own tentative exploration of that question. The turn away from theory is motivated by interests that are variously reasonable and reactionary, and too numerous to take on here. “Romanticism as Method” acknowledges that such a turn has taken place, attends to the many social and disciplinary histories involved in such a turn, but ultimately concentrates on developing alternative conceptions of Romanticism and of scholarship that might be of some good to students seeking doctoral degrees. Replacing theory with method means looking to Romanticism for its utility, not simply its power. More crucially, it means reclaiming the language of utility from those metrics of instrumental value—test scores, learning outcomes, impact factors, etc.—with which teachers at all levels are increasingly familiar.
The course I describe here is designed for first- and second-year graduate students, though in this case I allowed more advanced auditors to participate. As a graduate class, it focuses less on introducing students to a particular body of historical literature than on acquainting them with ways that literature has been read, and on finding new ways for us to read it together. Every week includes both required assignments and suggestions for further reading, intended to help those students who do not arrive already familiar with Romantic literature become conversant with its canonical and semi-canonical authors. That said, although it emphasizes texts and topics I would probably deem to difficult or too specialized for an undergraduate class, the principle of utility is one which, I think, may be helpfully drawn into all manner of classroom activities; so too is the ideal of experimentation and group improvisation a class on “method” demands. Every classroom may become a laboratory, and while the professor directs the experiment results are valued insofar as they are produced collaboratively.
When someone says that an activity
The philosopher Jason Stanley defines “know-how” as the knowledge that something is true—a proposition based, in turn, on the claim that all knowledge is founded in our capacity to imagine acting on such knowledge in a practical way (Stanley). Heidegger suggests that “the less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment” (Heidegger 98). Certainly when it comes to research, writing, and teaching, such activities benefit from a certain disinhibition, akin to the paradoxical acquisition of a “primordial” muscle memory. That said, when it comes to teaching graduate students, it seems necessary both to teach the know-how of scholarship and to keep students productively alienated from what they are doing when they are doing it. In the context of graduate coursework, this means creating opportunities not only to think about thinking but, more explicitly, to read about reading and write about writing. “Romanticism as Method” is designed to meet these ends. All assignments had to reflect actual demands made upon actual academics: students would write weekly response papers, give brief in-class presentations on primary-source material no one else in the room (besides the professor) had read, analyze the structure and style of a published article in their field and, at the end of term, give a talk on preliminary research for their seminar paper, which would be an article-length piece of work.
This is all very standard. The less orthodox dimensions of the course are evident in the reading list, which places four works of criticism at its center: two classic texts that position themselves explicitly with reference to theory, specifically to post-structuralism and new historicism, and two more recent books which take up the legacies of that earlier moment but do something very new with them. I chose books that had been important to me, so important their names came immediately to mind when I began planning the course: Paul De Man’s
As for the primary texts, it seemed to me that an emphasis on the “Big Six” version of the Romantic canon—the one which limits itself to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats—would provide a solid, albeit conservative, counterpoint to the improvisatory aegis of the course. Each week featured a chapter from two of the books mentioned above or one scholarly article, and a selection of Romantic poetry or, occasionally, prose. In contrast to an undergraduate course, where I like to assign secondary materials that explicate or contextualize the historical ones, the principle of pairing and selection here is less strict. We read Keats with Chandler and
To use Romanticism as a method is to assemble a toolkit out of phrases like “Negative Capability,” “gusto,” “they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause,” or “Labour well the Minute Particulars,” as Goodman has done with William Cowper’s “loopholes of retreat” and Levinson with Wordsworth’s numerical tropes (Goodman, especially 67-105; Levinson, “Of Being Numerous,” especially 652; and Levinson, “Notes and Queries”). But the kit must be filled with phrases of our own making, too, and this is where the weekly reading responses, posted on our online discussion board, come in. Students are encouraged to consider these as low-stakes venues for being propositional and adventurous. They may write, if they choose, in the style of one of the Romantic or contemporary authors we are reading. The goal is not parody but posture, walking in someone else’s shoes. It is, moreover, an attempt to realize that style, including phrasemaking, is constitutive of method. Writing like Hazlitt alters how you read a poem (or a person) and determines what kinds of claims you may advance about them. A criticism that “smokes,” in the Keatsian sense, might approach the condition of poetry by always being one step ahead of its reader or might treat the readerly impulse to understand as the very condition of its own opacity (Keats,
Class discussion is also directed toward the collective elaboration of a variety of interpretive procedures and points of view, specifically as they might be drawn from, and not merely applied to, the text at hand. To present one example, our seventh class is spent reading one of the less obviously interesting books of the 1805
The professor takes to the board, and gradually a piece of crowd-sourced scholarship emerges, a group effort that would be impossible without a serious engagement with multiple forms of knowledge. If this phantom piece of writing ever becomes a manuscript, some elements will be amplified, others edited out. The point of the exercise is to show that: having many ways into a text is not the same thing as being without method; scholarship is by definition collaborative, even if it is just you, Wordsworth, and a pencil; exegesis means false starts and wrong turns; it’s good not to bring too much ego into the room; be patient and curious, good poems can be tedious for good reasons; learning means learning how to teach, how to tell your reader, your students, your colleagues what you know in such a way that they may be said to know it now, too. For graduate students who are going on to careers as teachers, either in the academy or elsewhere, the classroom should always be a primarily pedagogical space with lines of instruction and reception running in several directions, some predictable and others less so.
It may seem overly tidy to assert that these are the lessons I myself learned from Romanticism, and from Romanticism’s best critics, although that is what I believe. Likewise, too, the principle that it is all right for work to be difficult and understanding slow—things one may plausibly tell graduate students, if not our increasingly harried undergraduates, at the very beginning of their academic careers. For those who have the luxury of encouraging digressive learning in the classroom, the model of learning-by-doing brings together more aleatory and indirect modes of instruction with a pragmatic ability to make something, knock it down, and start again, using the highly modular and sustainable resources of one’s own brain. “My head,” as Thoreau bafflingly says, “is an organ for burrowing,” and how many wider and deeper trails might be dug by the collaborative work that allows us to read, think, teach, and travel along—or rather, alongside—multiple pathways (Thoreau 82)? “Romanticism as Method” really means Romanticism as implement, tool, gizmo, hammer-thing, equipment. With it we work to make, among other things, more Romanticism.