Lynch 2015

Lynch, Deidre. Loving Literature. U of Chicago Press, 2015. Print.

Intro

• 1 affective labor in English studies
• 5 central argument/intervention and method: Collectively these chapters aim to outline how since its late C18 / early C19 reinvention, also the inaugural moment of its disciplinization, "English literature" has always been something more than an object of study, even for the architects of that disciplinization. It has also been implicated in its audience's libidinal dramas and in their understandings of their families and their erotic histories - hence English studies' eccentric relations to the norms of publicness and impersonality that seem to govern other knowledge-producing occupations. To ponder this implication, Loving Literature navigates among poetics, the history of aesthetics, and book history, on the one hand, and the histories of psychology, sexuality, and the family, on the other it surveys the redefinitions of literary experience - and of the interior spaces of the mind an dhome - that had to occur in order for the love of literature to become part of English studies' normal science.
  • thus could be read along with St Clair 2004, layering the affective on top of the economic book historical
• 8 the emergence of "literary subjectivity" in the "long era of sensibility" (Hume to Austen?), the indebtedness to affective experience in foundational texts of intellectual/aesthetic history -- this a model of understanding the development of the liberal individual in contact with (or determined) by literature that seems more engaged with historical reading practices than Armstrong 2005
• In the Extracts [from the Diary of a Lover of Literature, 1810, anonymous] the Lover's reading and commenting on books are presented as an end in themselves. And, indeed, texts that were works of "literature" (texts either written or recast and reappraised in those terms) required their readers to eschew in these special cases the practices of text indexing and epitomizing, of gutting for content, and "digesting," that before the C18 had so often defined all kinds of reading. With those works a different relation was required. In the newer account, what literature isn't, is something to be used. We don't treat literature as a thing but as a person: lovers of literature construct the aesthetic relation as though it put them in the prsence of other people and with the understanding that the ethical relations so conjured must not be instrumentalized.
  • ties to the types of reading Blair 2010 describes in EM reference works. Though as Price 2000 points out this kind of indexical and digestive reading still persist into the C19 and are abetted by print culture
• 11 The reluctance to engage the affected attachments that have connected readers to the institutions of English has inhibited us from bringing our histories of aesthetics between 1750 and 1850 into dialogue with accounts of this century as a pivotal epoch in the history of emotion, intimacy, and sexuality.
  • put in mind of the descriptions of reading in Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1848) especially but also David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850), coming at the end of this century and intensely affectively invested in the literature of the C18
• 13 Domestication in my book is something more than a straightforward process of homogenization and assimilation. The logics of affect reconstructed in Loving Literature are often perverse, aligning individuals and their desires in unexpected ways, to casting love as something that can collapse time and connect the living and dead.
  • again less foucauldian -- more like the domesticity chapter of Hughes and Lund 1991 than Armstrong.
• l/u Daniel Cotton, Why Education is Useless - "erotic rearmament campaign" to regain public legitimacy of English Studies

1

• the affective development of the literary canon
• 22 For in the C18, a comparable kind of anthropomorphizing numbered among the several transformations that led to the emergence onto the cultural stage of literature in the modern sense of the term [of loving]. This century witnessed various projects intended to affirm the humanity that was lodged in the artifacts of the book market and thus to close some of the gaps between the living world and the paper world. "Literature" owed much to new stories about authors, about the figure of the literary genius particularly, and to hermeneutic procedures that attached writing to a self-expressive, original, outsize personality -- as opposed, say, to casting it as an imitation of the best models, or a reiteration of favorite stories, or a citation from the Book of Nature conceptualized as an intertext of multiple correspondences and connections. Literary biography helped produce among print's C18 consumers the sense of a passionate human presence, a superogatory something lying behind certain books that make them something more than repositories of disembodied words. Taken as a group, biographies (especially collective biographies such as Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Enlgish poets, whose reception history focuses this chapters's second half) worked to establish that in their private lives too the authors were a breed apart -- a proposition that served to buttress the claims of literature in the new, narrowed sense of the term. And by the early C19, biographical writers' and biographical readers' determination to individuate authors and personalize writing had helped bring about a consequential transition. The old literary "lists" - the most apt rubric for the hybrids of authorial dictionaries and catalogues of worthies that had appeared on the scene in the C17 - gave way to something more demanding and deserving of emotional investment, a literary canon.
  • again a link to St Clair 2004
• 25-7 C17 and early C18 modes of organizing literary history - not the teleological "parade" to use St. Clair's phrase
• 27 Trevor Ross's magesterial account of the C18 emergence of literature...can help us place these books historically so as to explain the seemingly perverse relation these books have to our modern expectation that the poetic anthology should be the site of the imaginative communion joining readers to people called authors. A rhetorical culture, Ross states, as he reconstructs notions of literature before "Literature," values texts from the past only as a backdrop to ongoing cultural production, as possibly useful models for new compositions and spurs to new acts of eloquence. As an example of this arrangement, he instances Sir Philip Sidney's perfect courtier, who aimed "not onely to read others Poesies, but to poetise for others reading." But in the C17 that arragnement gradually gave way to one organized around the historically sensitive but tasteful reading of the "classics" of the past. This culture values literature "as a type of moral technology that could enrich students by virtue of the labor required to...appreciate it."
  • literature as "geared toward reception rather than invention"
  • ```l/u``` Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon
  • like production -> reading for appreciation the underlying shift in anthologies from early C18
• 30 [Bill] Sherman encapsulates the transition from early modern to modern thus: "We have moved from a culture in which readers take hold of texts for specific purposes to one in which texts generally take hold of readers."

2

• 65 ...mid C18 origins of historicism in English studies. I wish to press harder than other historians of literary historicism have on the fact that Britons' turn to their new classics, the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, occured at just the moment when taste seemed disappointingly chilly when it was not validated by the "affections of the heart."
  • e.g., sensibility. Could pair with Underwood 2013 on the development of historical perspective in fiction in early C19
• 67 [affective dimension of library history and embodiment] As we have already seen, it can be tricky to locate the disciplinary work of English in relation to those normative mappings of experience that demarcate the institutional from the intimate and expertise from sensibility. Perhaps the elbow chairs' introduction into the Bodleian helped begin that boundary confusion. What changed when scholarship began taking place in chairs that accommodated bodies' various forms rather than imposing the same vertical rectitude on all? Or perhaps this question should target another alteration of the furniture of the Oxford libraries. After the Bodleian's and the college libraries' unchaining in the closing decades of the C18 of the last of the books that they had hitherto fettered to lecterns, scholars could loll back inside their chairs in the expectation that, rather than their attending on the books, all books, event the folio volumes should come to them there.
• Rene Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (1941)
• 74 Shakespeare editing
• 79 interesting on Thomas Warton's investment in materiality vs earlier editor Richard Bentley's disavowal of it (1711)
• 86 ...the pleasures of possession as an aspect of historicism by reconstucting the centrality assigned to particular rare and curious books and manuscripts in that practice and the wory that this assignment provoked.
• 88 ...the degree to which readers and readerly experience are spotlighted in Warton's work on authors. The source studies that he pioneered assigned poets places in a discourse of genealogy, inheritance, and derivation - an assignment potentially at odds with the period's growing cult of authorial originality. Such source studies thus had the effect of making readers more consequential entities in history. And one advantage of this Wartonian view that linked the right reading of English to a knowledge of books that the canonical authors had read was that the pursuit of that knowledge appeared to open new possibilities for intimacy with the poetic dead. Pursued as an exercise in sympathetic imitation, source study could bring the C18 student closer to the ancient poet, the ground for their affinity consisting in their shared receptivity. This may have been one attractive effect of the vignettes that punctuated the new literary historiography of Warton and his allies and in which, we have seen the historian conjectured about the poets' formative encounters with the romances of their forebears and [89] imagined a Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, or Milton, during these trysts, receiving unawares the "impressions" that, once stored in his heart, would have nourished his imagination thereafter. These vignettes - portraits of the artist as a young reader - linked rather than separated the scene of reading and the scene of writing, literary reception and production.
  • useful for thinking about the long history of source study and how I need to conceptually distinguish my project of thinking about a work as "readerly output" from traditional source study
• 89 "Shakespeare's library"
• 95 As an additional effect of this historicist turn [prestige of distance from contemporary life], however, one might also remark how it separates out the heart's convictions from the head's learning. The literary past's alterity "engages the affections of the heart" (I recycle to language Warton uses when he states what the reader of Spenser who had given up on classical regularity might get in return for that renunciation). Classical values, by contrast, solicit "the cold approbation of the head." Hence, as well, Horace Walpole's terms in Anecdotes of Painting (1764) as he made explicit the incommensurability of the two accounts of prestige to which [Ted] Underwood alludes: "One must have taste to be sensible of the beauties of Grecian architecutre; one only wants passions to feel Gothic."
• In a complicated manner...that practice of "feeling Gothic" would become pivotal for the poetry professors' professionalism. It would help provide the auspices for a specifically masculine privacy - a privacy without women - that would lay the foundation for the public literary career. Even as C18 scholarship treating the Gothic library advanced the disciplinary transformations that would re-create ENglish poetry as a legitimately teachable, profess-able subject, those scholars continued to invest in a notion of literary reading as an after-hours, extracurricular affair, an experience by its nature inimical to the experience of formal schooling. Those investments underwrote the captivating charisma of "romantic poetry." Mediated by Wordsworthian precepts about aesthetic education, those investments would later help shape the doctrine that held that English teaching, if it was possible at all and not a contradiction in terms, needed to be conducted so as to address students' personal experiences and foster students' imaginative play.
• 96 The older reader, particularly the boy reader from the propertied classes, who, unlike his sisters, would receive a formal education, starts to be profiled...as a figure endowed with a double life. Sent to school, and set in front of one book, his Latin grammar, for instance, he dreams of another, a dreaming inflected by his nostalgia for an earlier period of his childhood. In such profiles, the romances become the symbol of the reader's mental liberty, at the same time that, as objects of memory, and as renewable resources that can be tapped long after childhood, they underpin an account of the self's integrity over time - an account of career development.
  • could be said of David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850) and maybe of Tom in The Mill on the Floss (1860) though with a difference, that he's really indifferent to reading generally and the "mental liberty" is effectively transferred to Maggie in her desire for the Latin grammar
• 98 The institutions of bookish intimacy that Oxford's bachelor culture evolved in order to formalize their truancy from that classical regime may well have shaped the terms that Warton used to establish the lovability of romantic poetry.

3 Wedded to Books

• 108 the ethos of companionate marriage to books evinced by early c19 bibliomaniacs might be interesting to read alongside Talia Schaffer's companionate marriage in Love's Rivals

Review

• MLQ Dec 2016 (Christopher Miller)
  • 603: Lynch contributes a welcome new affective dimension to now-familiar economic and sociological narratives of the emergence of “Literature” as a distinct category of writing—of canon formation, cultural capital, market- places, and mass production. “Loving” entails domestic intimacy, filial con- nection, possessiveness, fetishization, monogamy, escapist fantasy, and ances- tor worship. Literature as transmissible intellectual property ran up against literature as cherished object, as in Romantic familiar essays that celebrate a physical attachment to books in the masculine sanctuary of the private library.