Lynch 2015

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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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • l/u 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.
  • 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

  • excellent on the bibliophile or bibliomaniac
  • 104 Collectibles often seem to invite the collector to imbue them with human feelings, even though the collecting of books in particular seems to entail - often to the exasperation of the activity's critics - acts of objectification that convert books from authored texts into manufactured artifacts.
  • Starting in the late C18, their ["Black letter scholars" and collectors] specialized language of typeface, paper, and so forth served to make books, "until recently part of an unstructured mass...identifiable, desirable, and marketable." [Quote seems a bit of an overstatement] The discipline of descriptive bibliography that would take up the distinguishing features of book outsides as objects of study was still in its infancy when Warton died in 1790, and when it made its C19 debut in the republic of letters it would suffer in public opinion as a result of its perceived proximity to the irrational, exuberant, amorous world [105] of the collector.
  • 106 C19 rare book collectors perturbed and fascinated other members of literary culture not simply with their reluctance to think of reading in idealized, disembodied terms...but also with their reluctance even to think of reading at all.
  • The romantic period, as Piper 2009 has reminded us, is well known for working out a view of literature as something that "happens in the mind, not on the page." Repudiations of these collectors' failure to abstract meaning from the realm of corporeal particularity were thus to be expected, as were, at a moment of widespread uneasiness about the commercialization of culture, repudiations of teh collectors' readiness to seek their enjoyment in the marketplace.
  • 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
  • 112 the shift in the Roxburghe sale away from classical and tasteful texts to those which were bibliographically "curious," like Caxtons
    • can be traced then to Morris
  • 113 Bibliomania as counter to wider circulation In Dibdin's account [in Bibliomania] the bibliomania also borrows luster from the heritage consciousness of the period - hence his reference to "the productions of our ancestors." This period's several reprinting and anthologizing projects, the assembling, for instance, of canon-defining, multivolume "pocket" libraries of Britain's literary worthies, presented themselves as realizing the promise embedded in that first person plural [114] pronoun. Many of the booksellers conducting those projects implicitly claimed to be using cheap print to ensure that the nation's literary heritage was better held in common - a claim they tendered at the moment when, in William St. Clair's terms (St Clair 2004), "a huge corpus of traditional stories poems, and songs, which had been appropriated into private ownership in the early years of printing were returned to unrestricted common public use." Viewing the bibliomania against this backdrop did not work to the bibliomaniacs' advantage. Instead it tended to clarify how the "book-obsession impede[d] more than it facilitate[d] the circulation of books."
  • 115 enclosing literary history in the private space of the library collection
  • 116 The hyperactivity of the antiquarian book market during the romantic period was the result of a radical expansion in the number of objects that could be considered marketable cultural trophies. By certain estimates, some twelve million printed books from the late medieval and early modern periods, long sequestered, cascaded into the market following the revolutionary French state's confiscation of monastic and aristocratic libraries.
  • 117 [pushing against Foucauldian accounts of canon development as social control] But if the book madness also raises for romantic-period writers and readers enticing questions about what it means to get intimate with that impersonal thing called a "national heritage," then to nuance our paradigms for how cultural institutions hit home seems advisable. Doing justice to the social meanings of the bibliomania requires attending to the subjective experiences underpinning such meanings and so requires an account of the relation between the self and institutions that instances not just the coercive power structures of the Foucauldian prison, but also those power structures that reside in the family and in sexuality. The rare-book collectors' contemporaries grasped that the tale of possession enacted by those who had caught the bibliomaniacal bug was a story stranger and richer than the history of ownership and capital.
  • 126 opposition between accumulating books and reading literature -- the library as a site of "imperfect possession"
  • 135 The romantic period's memoirs of book love, we have seen, testify amply to the sociological and architectural transformations that were by the early C19 making marriage the privileged form of emotional intimacy and making the previously commercial, quasi-public space of the house into a personal sanctuary. We have sen how writers such as Hunt and Hazlitt appropriate the affective repreatory generated by these transformations in order to bring print culture home to their readers. But while they do so, they write women out of the home. The relations between the genders are effaced by a "bibliographical romance" that brokers between modern domesticity and the older traditions - of European humanism, for instance - in which bookishness had been the transactional currency of those special male friendships that were valued as meetings of minds.
  • 138-9 women's personal albums of literary texts -- connecting to the anthologizing in Price 2000, the world of the annuals, earlier commonplacing cultures

4 Going Steady

  • rereading as essential to loving and professing literature
  • 150 The canon is habit-forming.
  • Rereading's association with, for instance, an augmented cognitive mastery is neither inevitable nor historically constant. This is worth underlining because, as Michael Warner has observed, practitioners of literary studies have a bad track record when it comes to remembering that the "critical reading" for which they advocate in classrooms and mission statements finds its place in the world alongside other, competing ways of processing texts. Rereading so as to have by heart - to make a book one's constant companion - is not always congruent with rereading so as to know better and more deeply by knowing one's own assumptions. And the latter mode is not the only rereading practice that has been embedded within the disciplines of subjectivity.
  • 151 By the start of the Victorian era...readerly reiteration is also aligned with the ceremonies of timekeeping - the regularly scheduled homecomings, family meals, and gift exchanges - that, as the historian John Gillis claims, first become part of the work of kinship at this moment, when they first provided middle-class families with modern means of confirming their togetherness through time.
    • l/u John Gillis, "Making Time for Family: The Invention of Family Time(s) and the Reinvention of Family History"
  • 152 Working within a medico-moral context that valued habit as the guiding mechanism of individual identity and social structure, social commentators on reading were, by our lights, surprisingly inclined to view such reflex actions [of rereading, of "just" reading], despite their mitigation of the will, as testimonials to constancy.
  • 153 Great books (so classified) are not only socially certified sources of great ideas or artistry. That description doesn't exhaust our transactions with them. The story of inexhaustibly rereadable Great books is also that of valetudinarians' [hypochondriacs'] health regimens, of the compulsory coupledom of a new marriage culture, and of the transformations that reinvented the family and that made a group formerly understood primarily as a unit of economic production into Western culture's primary scene of emotional gratification. Seeking to recover some of those less told stories, this chapter tracks...the elaborate efforts readers and publishers made, beginning late in the C18, to incorporate aesthetic experiences into the continuum of everyday life. It links the emergence of that new kind of love object, "l-iterature," both to people's new attentiveness to the time scheme that they were only then learning to call "everyday" and to their new conviction that this time scheme -- that of the unremarkable, ongoing status quo - was affection's true home.
  • Placing the novel in the context of the everyday love that literature seemed to solicit by definition (a new definition) calls attention to the longueurs and long-term obligations with which novel readers by definition cope.
  • 156 [Book history and secularity] Book history has sometimes sorted out "intensive" reading from "extensive" reading by associating the first - the rereading of a few prized texts (usually the Bible and the devotional manuals that were its auxiliaries) - and the C19 with the second - with the cursory, scattershot reading encouraged by a culture of cheap print that invites consumers to scurry from one ephemeral novelty to the next. In this taxonomic scheme, the C19's role is to epitomize that second mode and complete the "epochal shift from Bible to a generalized biblios" that gets underway with the advent of print capitalism. The understanding of secularization that underwrites this periodizing of book history, one in which a clean break intervenes between a discrete age of faith and a discrete age of the market, has been complicated in recent scholarship on the sociology of religiosity.... Keeping this discussion in mind brings to view what conventional oppositions between sacred and secular, between intensive and extensive reading, can occlude: the productive confusions between literary and religious sanctity that comprise the post-Enlightenment history of literariness. After all, as William McKelvy has outlined, the ecclesiastic context was a key site for the late C18 "invention of English literature"; this new literary authority was to a great extent shaped by parsons scribbling in their manses. Keeping this discussion in mind makes it easier too to acknowledge the resemblances - for a start, the shared ritualistic quality - linking devoted readers' returns to beloved old books to the observances of those Protestant communicants whose regular, three-chapter-a-day schedule of Bible readings had long been enabling them to transverse the span from Genesis to Revelations on an annual basis. Indeed, it makes it easier to acknowledge that those two categories of readers are likely to have overlapped.
    • Blair 2010 on intensive/extensive dichotomy
    • Turner 2010 usefully counters the cheap print for mere ephemerality claim: there it's cheap print for greater civic and intellectual engagement
  • 161 [daily anthology and bildung?] [Leigh Hunt's A Book for a Corner anthology] To enhance his readers' sense that the authors whom he excerpted "sympathize with [them] through all the portions of [their lives]," Hunt in fact arranged the anthology's contents so that "the first extract is a Letter addressed to an infant [a poem by the bluestocking Catherine Talbot], the last the Elegy in a Churchyard [by Thomas Gray], and the intermediate ones have something of an analogous reference to the successive stages of existence." Nowadays we may scarcely
    • is there a way to link the intellectual project of this kind of diurnal anthology to that of the bildungsroman, especially the serialized one, as David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)? Cross ref too with Price 2000 on anthologies
  • 163 Over the course of the C18, almanac and pocket-book makers had established a certain set of print protocols to make visible time's uniformity (the empty spaces of identical dimension, one succeeding the other as the almanac's user proceeds methodically through the book). They number, accordingly, among the discoverers of "homogenous, empty time." In the Pocket-Book, as literariness is adapted to this format, its dailiness becomes visible too.
    • ref to Hunt's The Literary Pocket-Book l/u
  • 164-5 It is easy to overlook [the] political dimension of the fusing of literariness with everydayness - the challenge to class hierarchy embedded in this policy of vulgarization. (The Literary Pocket-Book "saunters between the polite and the plebian" in ways that, as other descriptions of Hunt's Cockney informality have stressed, often infuriated tradition-minded commentators.) The analytic difficulty that this mode of romantic anthologizing poses for the C21 critic is that its impulse to make literariness familiar is now itself become excessively familiar.
  • Pledged to familiarity, kitsch repudiates the distanced relationship to phenomena that is valued in orthodox accounts of the aesthetic transaction. Of course, recovering the historicity of the love of literature has, throughout this book, meant tracing a counterplot to those orthodox accounts of the development of aesthetics, since these tend to make, not attachment, but detachment their end point. The retroactive Kantianism of the orthodox account predisposes it to highlight disinterested judgments wherever they can be found. It occludes therefore the aspects of romantic-period aesthetic theorizing that helped to legitimate readers' investments in reiterability[.]
  • 179 In ways we tend to overlook, canonicity was correlated to texts' fitness for that role of "hourly companion" and their capacity to put an audience in touch with that temporality that takes shape as an unbroken series. It makes sense that, under that new arrangement, one in which literature was supposed to merge the cyclical rhythms of our everyday holding patterns, novels would have an edge.
  • 180 Felluga tracing novels coming to be thought of as potentially "preservatives rather than poisons" in 1810s: "Might we connect the novel's gradual ascendency in the generic hierarchy to the proposition that, to maximize well-being, every reading should [181] represent a resumption of an earlier, interrupted reading?"
  • [Discussing Richardson's Clarissa (cf again Price 2000) and Sterne's Tristram Shandy] These prolix means of compounding voluminousness and of keeping books on a "life-support system" speak to a discrepancy between the c18 voluminous authors' understanding of novel reading and the narrow mandate ascribed to that activity in modern-day criticism. That criticism envisions readers reading for closure, for revelation and then resolution. But where process is "more important than completion," readers also "read for continuation": they read to carry on both without ever leaving off and after reading off.
    • l/u J Paul Hunter, "Serious Reflections on Farther Adventures: Resistances to Closure in C18 English Novels"
  • Part of what makes these fictions voluminous is their determination to give this ordinary pottering and piddling their due.
  • 183 Moretti's insights into a romantic-period overhaul of the novel's relationship to time do helpfully explain the transformation of attitudes toward the health of the novel reader discernible in this era. In Moretti's account, Austen, Goethe, and Walter Scott relegate the unheard of and the untoward, earlier fiction's strange, surprising adventures, to the background of the novel form. They relocate to the foreground the more modest happenings - the walking, talking, eating, shopping, and, also, reading - that in their repetitions "give regularity to existence." In their hands, accordingly, "fillers" - the prosy materials that are reluctant to narration - triumph over plot.
  • 188 The most famous Victorian practitioner of the anthologizing enterprise shaped earlier by figures such as Samuel Johnson and Leigh Hunt was Francis Turner Palgrave. His The Golden Treasury of English verse (1861), covering the span from the Elizabethans to the Romantics, is said to have sold ten thousand copies a year for over a century. In the preface to its first edition, Palgrave tacitly recapitulates arguments about the brain, attention, and time that informed medical culture's promotion of healthful habit.... Palgrave's allusion to the perceptual [189] disorders thought to be wrought by railway travel and the attendant experience of speed (railway brain) is a reminder that under the aegis of modernity's temporal order it became possible, as usages recorded in the OED confirm, for people, as well as clocks and machinery, to find themselves "mistimed." The adjective designated digestive disturbances and sleep disorders - the arrhythmic ailments that might be counteracted by bedtime routines[.]

Ch 5 about quotation

Ch 6

  • 262 Beginning in the 1860s, sometimes in violation of copyright, a series of booksellers contrived to reissue the works of certain romantic poets...in books that were, in the phrase that became standard, "illustrated by photography": sumptuously bound and gilded volumes whose ostentatious materiality registered the Victorians' readiness to convert memories into mementoes - tangible, possessible, and commodifiable.
  • 267 these books (and the Romantic poetry they contain) as "media museums"


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.
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