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This essay explains the rationale behind a willfully anachronistic creative writing prompt: if one of the British Romantics were alive today, how would he or she craft a literary response to 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror? Instead of asking what makes the twenty-first-century experience of terror new, my assignment encourages students to approach today’s affective environment through the medium of British Romantic literature. The following discussion offers a pedagogical framework and theoretical justification for inviting undergraduates to map the untimely affects that fuse the contemporary age of terror with its Romantic-era double. The essay concludes with a survey of exemplary student work.
In what way does Edward Snowden’s story read like an updated version of William Godwin’s
Instead of assigning a traditional analytic essay in which students might compare the concerns of British Romantic literature and culture with those of our twenty-first-century moment, I invited the class to write in a creative mode. The approach let them tap into the affective registers of historical consciousness that eludes analytic writing, or so Thomas Pfau’s
The seminar drew on British Romantic literature as a medium for reflecting on our emotional life in the present. Instead of asking what makes the twenty-first-century experience of terror new, I posed a different question: where have we already seen our own range of moods and structures of feeling before? Toward this end, I led the class through a series of texts—among them, Ann Radcliffe’s
To borrow Walter Scott’s comment from the “Dedicatory Epistle” to
The following essay describes the pedagogical rationale behind my course’s untimely treatment of “Literature in the Age of Terror.” To begin, I explain my strategies for juxtaposing our contemporary age of terror with its Romantic-era double. From there, I draw on the work of Thomas Pfau and Jonathan Flatley to justify my core methodology: constructing a comparative archive of affective intensities to calibrate the interplay between British Romantic literature and culture and our post-9/11 moment. The essay concludes by assessing the writing that my students completed for their final projects.
At the outset of the semester, my first task was to persuade the class that it makes sense to study late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature alongside the contemporary. To establish a connection between these two seemingly disparate moments, I turned to Marc Redfield’s
our specifically political use of the words “terror” and “terrorism” emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, forming part of the broad historical phenomenon that literary scholars call romanticism. The capitalized nominative “Terror” has, of course, a historiographical referent: it designates more or less the period between the fall of the Girondins (June 1793) and the fall of Robespierre (July 27, 1794 or 9 Thermidor). (72)To Redfield’s point, the
Building on this point, I invited students to compare our current geopolitical situation with that of the Romantic authors we were reading. For instance, I called their attention to the time that elapsed between William Wordsworth’s travels in France during the early 1790s and his eventual description of those experiences in the 1805
To complement the discussion, I introduced students to scholarship that implicitly or explicitly affirms Romanticism’s bearing on the present. We began the semester by considering Terry Castle’s thought-provoking observations about the continuity between visual representations of 9/11 and the history of art that finds sublimity in scenes of destruction. Through John Barrell’s account of the British obsession with imagining political violence during the mid-1790s, we saw the makings of twenty-first-century arguments both for and against government surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures. Jan Mieszkowski’s analysis of Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” prompted a conversation about the patriotic rhetoric that followed 9/11 and the Boston marathon bombing. What David Clark describes as Kant’s wariness about celebrating military victory also raises hard questions about the riotous celebrations that took place on American college campuses following the May 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.
All of these conversations reinforced the point that Romanticism functions as an anachronism in Jerome Christensen’s (or for that matter, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s) sense of the term: namely, a “potent icon of the past’s incapacity to coincide with itself, to seal itself off as a period or epoch or episode with no or necessary consequences for our time. Anachronism is the herald of the future as yet unknown” (3). Christensen’s formulation usefully challenged the class’s tendency to assume that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are over and done with. Instead, he suggests that Romanticism cannot be walled off behind the perfected closure of the past. As with all writing, the definitive meaning of British Romantic literature has yet to be written; its history remains in process and open to future reinterpretation.
In keeping with the seminar’s embrace of anachronism as a strategy for bringing British Romantic literature into the present, while simultaneously filtering contemporary life through the otherness of the past, I gave students a purposefully anachronistic prompt for their final assignment: if one of the British Romantics were alive today, how would he or she craft a literary response to 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror? The challenge was to imagine how Ann Radcliffe, for example, might react to our own time. The unorthodox prompt invited the class to compose a creative work that addresses the repercussions of 9/11 in the voice or characteristic style of a Romantic-era writer. But why ask students to write in a creative mode instead of composing a traditional, analytic essay? Furthermore, how does literary imitation give students a fresh perspective on the present? What’s to be gained by using Romantic literature to remediate our contemporary situation?
My response to the first question expands upon arguments put forward in Thomas Pfau’s
If anything, college-age students in 2016 are primed to reflect on the affective tenor of historical experience. After all, they were only in kindergarten or first grade—five or six years old,—when the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks occurred. Experiencing 9/11 and its aftermath from a child’s perspective gives today’s young people an intuitive understanding of the visceral yet elusive force of historical events that are felt more than understood.
But why should my class’s efforts to mobilize the affective dimension of historical consciousness take the form of a literary imitation, as I stipulate in my assignment? Building on Jonathan Flatley’s notion of
By this term [self-estrangement] . . . I mean a self-distancing that allows one to see oneself as if from outside. But I also mean estrangement in the sense of defamiliarization, making one’s emotion life—one’s range of moods, set of structures of feeling, and collection of affective attachments—appear weird, surprising, unusual, and thus capable of a new kind of recognition, interest, and analysis. (80)Affective mapping entails a depersonalization of the moods, sentiments, and visceral sensations that are commonly taken as the hallmark of selfhood. In order to decouple affect from subjectivity, Flatley invokes the specifically aesthetic device of defamiliarization.
To give Flatley’s discussion a concrete pedagogical application, I asked my classes to imitate a Romantic-era author on the syllabus. On the one hand, doing so made our “now” resemble the otherness of a “then.” On the other hand, the reverse is also true, in that any movement away from our “own” moment and into the Romantic period eventually makes a circuitous return to the moods and affects that define the present as much as the past. Through their writing project, students hereby produced maps or mappings in the sense of calibrating the resonance between Romanticism’s structure of feeling and our contemporary mood. As Flatley aptly observes, “we never experience an affect for the first time; every affect contains within it an archive of its previous objects” (81). My goal was to provide students with a framework for charting the age of terror that inflects both the Romantic and the contemporary.
The result was a wealth of thought-provoking work examining what Mary Favret describes as the affect of everyday war. Students gravitated to Austen’s
To understand how students went about capturing the echoes of war in everyday
life, consider the work of Hillary Lynch, who rewrote Coleridge’s “Fears in
Solitude” as if it were composed during the April 2013 manhunt for the
Boston marathon bombers. Aptly retitled “Fears in Collective Solitude,”
Lynch’s poetic imitation explores the strange time that Bostonians spent
“sheltering in place”:
Where Coleridge’s original poem contends that the threat
of war has a pernicious influence on public discourse, Lynch underscores the
similarly far-reaching impact of an actual terror attack, which reverberates
out from the scene of carnage to radically disrupt the ordinary routines and
daily rhythms of an entire country. According to Lynch, the collective
terror of “wait[ing] along, together, breadth held” has a visceral intensity
that distantly echoes the physical damage wrought on Boylston Street. What
Favret says about Austen’s
The spectacle of war has no less of an effect on the phantasmagoria of our
emotional lives, or so student Rae Purdom holds. Specifically, Purdom offers
a Radcliffean meditation on the medium of television news, which
simultaneously reports distant conflicts and evokes the ghostly presence of
a lost love one. Purdom takes her inspiration from the scene in which Emily
St. Aubert returns to the library of her recently deceased father. Coming
upon her father’s armchair and an open book by one of his favorite authors,
“the idea of him rose so distinctly to [Emily’s] mind,” writes Radcliffe,
“that she almost fancied she saw him before her” (95). In Purdom’s version,
the familiar easy chair faces a television tuned to CNN. As the stream of
martial images washes over her, Purdom’s young protagonist, Jessica, recalls
watching
In keeping with what Terry Castle describes as that
characteristically Radcliffean tendency to “spectralize” the dead or absent
as “an image . . . on the screen of consciousness itself,” Purdom uses the
medium of the television to frame the ghostly intersection between
geopolitical conflict and personal loss (“Spectralization” 237).
Specifically, Purdom brings Jessica’s visceral encounter with the felt
“absence of her mother’s hand tousling her hair” into alignment with the
ambient grief of watching war from a distance.
Another distinctive feature of Purdom’s efforts to map the resonance between home life and a war zone is the gesture of conflating Vietnam, 9/11, and the “threat of imminent violence” into one long, interminable conflict. Purdom’s anachronistic thinking is just one example of the class’s broader interest in the affect of broken time. Fellow student Michael Samblas makes the point explicit in noting that like contemporary Americans, the characters of Austen’s
Ever since the September 11 attacks, we have been constantly looking back at that momentous event, and allowing it to define our society to this day. We constantly refer to the time we live in as “post 9/11” and observe the anniversary of the event every year. This is in keeping with Austen’s themes of living in the past . . . [Having said that] our obsession with the past seems to stem more from a fear of having to repeat it. Austen’s characters, on the other hand, are activelyJust as Anne Elliot’s life stagnates during the almost eight years since she ended her brief engagement with Captain Frederick Wentworth and he went off to war, our “post-9/11” era likewise seems to hover around the recent past, Samblas astutely observes. The hallmark of our—and Anne’s—belated temporal condition is captured in the fear and/or fantasy that the past is about to repeat itself.trying to relive these moments that they keep reflecting back on. (unpublished essay)
Renata Anuhea Sebstad’s imitation of Austen raises the same issue. In her short story, Sebstad dramatizes a mother’s anxiety about a son who is stationed at the military base in Fort Hood, Texas. The Austenian element can be found in Sebstad’s choice to begin her story shortly before the first Fort Hood shooting incident of November 2009 and end just prior to the second mass shooting, which took place in April 2014. Much as Austen’s audience knew that Anne Elliot’s concluding “dread of a future war” would soon become a reality, Sebstad invites her reader to anxiously await an event that has not yet taken place within the diegetic universe of the narrative, thereby validating the protagonist’s overwhelming sense of foreboding. Through the modalities of apprehension and unease, both protagonist and reader intuit that the linear advance of time bends back on itself to form an untimely cycle of violence.
Ben Socolofsky picks up the thread again in adopting Radcliffe’s distinctive
style of haunted consciousness to evoke the spectral afterlife of 9/11.
Reimagining St. Aubert as a casualty of the World Trade Center collapse,
Socolofsky follows his daughter, Emily, through the subsequent months of
mourning. Of particular interest is Socolofsky’s dramatization of Emily’s
post-traumatic encounter with the “Tribute in Light” art installation, which
periodically projects two columns of light skyward from the former World
Trade Center site. Unable to believe her eyes, Emily briefly wonders whether
the Twin Towers are about to collapse all over again—a sense of
Even as a number of students sought to elaborate on Favret’s claim that the affect of everyday war “eludes the usual models for organizing time such as linearity, punctuality, and periodicity,” others found that their experience of uncertain times did not raise issues of temporality so much as emphasize their sense of uncertainty (11). For one, Teddy S. Miller used
The tension between curiosity and paranoia comes to a head in the conclusion
of Miller’s short story, which describes the thought process behind Adael’s
resolution to keep bin Laden’s body covered: Not once, even when I
held the body in my hands did I allow the veil to slip off and reveal
the identity of the man beneath. In doing so I sentenced myself to live
the rest of my life in uncertainty, with the only thing that could make
me believe in truth again lying at the bottom of the sea. (unpublished
essay)
Without attempting to reproduce Godwin’s plot, Miller
emulates the dynamic of the novel’s original courtroom ending, in which
Falkland never confesses his guilt and Caleb’s accusations remain
unverified. As Pfau notes about Godwin’s original ending, “nothing ever
offers extrinsic and objective confirmation for Caleb’s key hypothesis
regarding Falkland’s guilty past” (140). The point applies equally well to
Miller’s conclusion, in which the protagonist fails to confirm bin Laden’s
ultimate fate and consequently descends into paranoid uncertainty.
Dominic Poropat’s imitation of Radcliffe’s
Despite Austen’s sendup of
Poropat’s short narrative shares in the class’s collective effort to map the affective dimension of life in uncertain times. Mobilizing an array of affects that ranged from the banal to the phantasmatic, regret to dread, curiosity to paranoid anxiety, students used their creative writing as a vehicle for tapping into a tacit sense that the “War on Terror” has unmoored their sense of time and left them adrift in doubt. To do so, the class embraced anachronism. By addressing the legacy of 9/11 in the voice or literary style of a writer from the syllabus, students navigated the double contemporaneity that makes Romanticism both characteristic of the present and simultaneous with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the process, students began to channel the visceral power of historical experience that cannot quite be named.