Cover to Why Literary Periods Mattered
Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies.
Ted Underwood. Stanford UP, 2013. ISBN: 9780804788441
I have been more than slightly embarrassed by my dissertation, Romanticism and the Cult of Celebrity: Afterlives in Postmodern Film and Fiction, since finishing it in 2008. The dissertation argues, through a series of parallel readings between Romantic history and postmodern fiction, that the Romantic artist came to signify anxieties about the death of literature. The text comes up on Google searches, and I wince. During my defense, my committee members said “your project makes me feel very old, like I’m at my own funeral,” “how is this about Romanticism?,” “you set yourself up as this new rebel scholar, and you critique everything, but you don’t show us what’s there to replace it.” It was obvious that the project’s use of parallel readings, its analysis of a dying literary institution, and its general disinterest in locating arguments in a single period confused my usually anti-historicist committee members. My advisor, Richard Burt, deftly managed and redirected an increasingly complex array of urgent theoretical questions that I frankly couldn’t answer - always confident that I was doing something interesting. I didn’t feel like I would graduate, talking to my friend Patrick McHenry (who was kind enough to take notes during the defense), I said, “I feel like they hated it.” Needless to say, I passed and my committee was generous with their comments and suggestions, but my dissertation haunts me like a ghost I can never give up. I haven’t published it at a University Press, and I don’t really plan to.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my dissertation had awkwardly keyed into anxieties that Ted Underwood argues lay at the very heart of literary studies: the idea the unique prestige of English is dependent upon historical periodization. Ted Underwood has been influential in digital literary studies for the past several years by producing increasingly sophisticated topic model analyses of institutional and linguistic literary history. Along with Andrew Goldstone, Underwood modeled the entire history of the PMLA to see if the resulting maps could say anything about disciplinary history. He has also asked compelling questions about literary point-of-view and diction, showing that topic modeling can open up entirely new areas of research for a field that has seemed to be narrowing for a while. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed in Twitter and Facebook conversations a growing unease with the disciplinarity of English as it is researched and taught across the country. “I’m honestly not even sure what discipline I’m in,” he admitted in a Facebook conversation with me about digital literary pedagogy. The admission is key, I think, in understanding Underwood’s perspective. He realizes just how much things are changing right now, and how deeply his own work is challenging English’s traditional organization as a discipline.
Why Literary Periods Mattered is a fascinating and urgently-needed institutional history of why literary studies fixates on periods. English’s disciplinary commitment to periodization runs deep, and has consequently remained invisible while more familiar controversies (New Criticism, deconstruction, New Historicism) rose to the surface. The reliance on periodization is so invisible, in fact, that it causes an institutional amnesia about the earliest periods of literary theory. Most histories of literary theory start with New Criticism (“what about this criticism is new?,” I always found myself asking), then move through the newer schools of cultural theory. In a masterful reading of the English discipline’s founding at University College and King’s College in 1828 Underwood shows how important it is to read figures like Henry Rogers, whose General Introduction to a Course of Lectures on English Grammar and Composition (1838) argued that “explain[ing] the transitions that linked each stage of linguistic development [in literary history] to the next” was absolutely necessary in mastering rhetoric and writing; and William Taylor, who produced a popular 1813 book regarding the practice of desynonymization in which two seemingly similar words are discriminated carefully by an expert through their etymologies. I remember the explanation of words through etymologies being a minor cornerstone of many English classes, but never knew its institutional origin.
Underwood explains that the period survey course was invented as an extension of many of these practices. One can easily see, for example, a connection between the recovery projects of radical antiquarians connected to etymological expert John Horne Tooke and Underwood’s reading of James Macpherson’s sense that “the past lives on, not through continuous tradition, but through the social changes that transform it into something memorably dated.” Underwood explains further that this is an “odd vision of immorality-one that locates collective permanence not in a church, in posterity, or in a vector of progress, but rather in moments of mutual incomprehension that would appear to undermine all permanence.” I’m reminded of Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, in which Blake’s anachronism is read as a device to sever our connection with a present that seems oppressive, harmful, and fleeting. Blake countered the rise of what he called the “dark satanic mills,” heralding both the shadow of industrialization and the deaths of the Napoleanic Wars, by appealing to ancient British myths, whose disjunction with the present illustrated a potent alternative. This disjunction is read as “radical” by Makdisi when, in fact, it’s been institutionalized practice in literature departments for at least 150 years.
English curriculum sets up a series of discrete periods in time that are as completely separate from one another as they are to the present. Underwood shows just how essential this understanding of temporality is to our discipline by investigating the early history of comparative literature, which attempted to develop literary history as a continuous “theory of cultural change.” He takes Gayatri Spivak’s argument in Death of a Discipline that comparative literature “was a result of European intellectuals fleeing ‘totalitarian’ regimes” to task by showing how early comp lit studied the “continuous processes of development” that “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” It was only after this movement failed to be successfully institutionalized into English curriculum and Rene Wellek suggested that the comparative literature model “resign[ed] [English departments] to [...] apply some extra-literary standard” to explain the process of literary history that comparative literature took on its more familiar guise - that of comparing different national literatures based upon historical periodization. The underlying argument is clear to Underwood - that the autonomy of English departments is seen as under threat if scholars stray too closely to other explanatory models when constructing curriculum.
Underwood’s final chapter on the digital humanities underscores this theme of threat as he recounts his difficulty in explaining the results of separate topic modeling projects to his English colleagues. Underwood’s project analyzed the gradual emergence of a literary diction in the nineteenth century, “set apart by fictive and aesthetic aims.” When discussing his findings, he’s asked what his research “tells us about romanticism” or how he would include figures like Wordsworth into his analysis. For Underwood, the questions reveal a genuine tension between quantitative methodologies and traditions in literary studies. “[T]hey,” Underwood says about quantitative studies, “tend to produce generalizations of a fluid kind that resist translation into the familiar entities of literary-historical argument (a literary movement, an emblematic author, a cultural turn).” The problem, in other words, is not that the study of literature is not suited to computation, rather that literary scholars are too used to periodization to easily appreciate the fluid generalizations or smooth gradient curves that might result from a large-scale analysis.
Initially, I was slightly disappointed that Ted’s book did not focus as much on the topic modeling work I’ve found so useful on his blog. But I think his work has given those of us who study literature and the digital humanities something much more valuable. Why Literary Periods Mattered puts into relief the challenges digital technologies are making to traditional forms of literary analysis. Furthermore, it provides those of us who want to teach digital humanities a valuable lesson: if we want DH to prosper in literature departments, it has to make sense on a curricular level. How would you teach topic modeling in a literature survey course? How would considering distant reading an essential skill for undergraduates transform the discussion format that is so endemic to our classrooms? These are important conversations to have, and we are lucky Ted Underwood has started them for us in such an honest manner.