Romantic Sobriety Wang, Orrin N. C. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Wang, Orrin N. C. Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.1766. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1766 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 11:55 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Romantic Sobriety This page intentionally left blank Romantic Sobriety Sensation, Revolution, Commodifi cation, History ORRIN N. C. WANG The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wang, Orrin Nan Chung, 1957– Romantic sobriety : sensation, revolution, commodifi cation, history / Orrin N. C. Wang. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0066-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-0066-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Romanticism. 2. Senses and sensation in literature. 3. Marxist criticism. 4. Deconstruction. 5. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Title. PN56.R7W37 2011 809Ј.9145—dc22 2010046803 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post- consumer waste, whenever possible. In memory of Betty S. Wang and Richard J. Conroy This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction The Sensation of Romanticism 1 part i periodicity 15 1 Romantic Sobriety 17 2 Kant All Lit Up: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius 36 part ii theory 61 3 De Man, Marx, Rousseau, and the Machine 63 4 Against Theory beside Romanticism: Mute Bodies, Fanatical Seeing 84 5 The Sensation of the Signifi er 111 6 Ghost Theory 138 part iii texts 159 7 Lyric Ritalin: Time and History in “Ode to the West Wind” 163 8 No Satisfaction: High Theory, Cultural Studies, and Don Juan 190 9 Gothic Thought and Surviving Romanticism in Zofl oya and Jane Eyre 218 10 Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation 250 Coda The Embarrassment of Romanticism 281 Notes 289 Index 357 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments Unlike the Beatles, I had a lot of help from my friends. A number of individuals read and commented on portions of the book: Jonathan Auerbach, Marshall Brown, James K. Chandler, Jonathan Culler, David L. Clark, William Cohen, Marianne Conroy, Neil Fraistat, Colin Jager, David Kaufmann, Jon Klancher, Marshall Grossman, Brian McGrath, W. J. T. Mitchell, Patrick O’Malley, Daniel O’Quinn, Thomas Pfau, Marc Redfi eld, Hugh Roberts, David Wagenknecht, and Deborah Elise White. I especially want to thank David L. Clark, Jon Klancher, William Galperin, and Peter Manning for their timely interventions and support during diff erent phases of the writing of the manuscript. I’m forever in debt to the smart and perceptive commentary that everyone gave me. All errors and short- comings of the book are my own. I also want to thank Jonathan Auerbach, Mari- anne Conroy, Elizabeth Fay, Neil Fraistat, and Daniel O’Quinn for their advice and encouragement during various moments of the long trek that was this book. Ralph Bauer and Zita Nunes also cheerfully came to my aid in diff erent ways as this project reached its completion. David Rettenmaier and Jeremy Horsefi eld did a splendid job helping me put the manuscript in order; the P. G. Cool Pool and Alex Paraskevas helped with the chakra side of things. Dan S. Wang was a friendly intellectual presence throughout the writing of the book. Marshall Grossman inspired this non-Renaissance project in ways that I’m still discover- ing; I miss him greatly. My thanks to my students, to the Washington Area Romanticists Group, and to the University of Maryland Theory Colloquium for providing me audiences where many of the ideas in the book were fi rst formulated and tested. A Univer- sity of Maryland Graduate Research Board Award gave me the necessary push to fi nish writing and conceiving a large portion of the book. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 1999); chapters 2 and 4 in Diacritics 30, no. 4 (Winter 2000) and 35, no. 2 (Summer 2005); x Acknowledgments and chapters 6 and 10 in Studies in Romanticism. A version of chapter 3, “De Man, Marx, Rousseau, and the Machine,” also appeared in Aft er Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, edited by Tilottama Rajan and Michael O’Driscoll (© University of Toronto Press, 2002), and is used with permission of the publisher. My thanks to the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the Bodleian Libraries, the British Museum, and Laurent Mannoni and Cinéma- thèque française, collections d’appareils for permission to reproduce the images in the book. To Marianne Conroy, my gratitude for what we will always both know. To Margaret Limei Wang, my glorious little lark, whose entrance into our lives over- lapped with a large part of this work, my thanks for the patience you’ll someday come to appreciate, and for the impatience I in spite of myself can only treasure. This book is dedicated to the memory of Betty S. Wang and Richard J. Conroy, whose global peregrinations made up one huge swath of the last century’s his- tory, in all its poignancy and fi nality. That some things are never fi nal is our burden, and our hope, if not this work’s. Romantic Sobriety This page intentionally left blank introduction The Sensation of Romanticism Tiz dizziness to think of it.—John Keats, Endymion Over the course of its ten chapters, this book stages a series of encounters among a number of key terms associated with the British and European Romantic topos: periodicity, revolution, commodifi cation, materiality, and ideology, to name the ones that occur most frequently. Structuring most if not all of these encounters is the fi gure of sensation, a term whose relationship with the study of Romanti- cism is a storied one, both within and beyond the fi eld. Literary scholars have extensively explored the topic of sensation, or the experience of the senses, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, along with such attendant themes as sensibility and feeling. Sensing the world, the body, and one’s own self has been a mainstay of our understanding of Romanticism in both its humanist and postmodern forms. This study of Romanticism and sensation attempts to distinguish itself in two ways. The fi rst involves the counterintuitive exploration of Romanticism as an event equally fascinated by the rejection of sensation, equally caught up in a Ro- mantic sobriety. As the term implies, however, such a sobriety can mean more than one thing. It can refer to a Romantic renunciation or policing of the senses; it can also mean a rejection of Romanticism as itself a literature, philosophy, or culture of misguided sensation. As much as late eighteenth- and nineteenth- century authors evince a suspicion of various modes of sensation and strain to- ward ways of ameliorating bodily and non-bodily forms of addiction, later think- ers will defi ne their vision of literature, aesthetic, and world by the degree that it posits a cure from Romanticism. One can defi ne Romanticism by its sobriety, but one can also demonstrate one’s sobriety by judiciously abstaining from all that Romanticism off ers. Romantic sobriety signifi es an unavoidable doubling in the identity of Romanticism itself, one that also allows the very notion of Romanticism 2 Romantic Sobriety to come into being, not simply as a positive identity—the act of sobriety, say— but also as the negative other that results when another identity represents itself as decidedly non-Romantic—a Modernism, for example, no longer beholden to Romanticism’s messy habits. The issue of Romanticism’s very form, a mainstay question in the fi eld of Romantic studies, fi nds itself entangled with the problem of Romantic sobriety, of staying sober about Romanticism. The dizzying eff ects of such logic become part of Romanticism, generating infl ections to the mean- ing of Romantic sobriety that sustain but also go beyond instantiation of, or dis- identifi cation with, the Romantic event. This book is a tracking of such eff ects. The second way Romantic Sobriety tries to distinguish itself has to do with a methodology that understands such semantic generation as necessarily involving the aporias of a tropological condition. Sensation in this book is neither a pri- marily psychological nor empirical phenomenon to be studied and shaped into a coherent history of various intersecting Romantic-era disciplines, say, between literature and science, or literature and economics. Rather, sensation is a fi gure, whose meanings profi tably ground its use within a number of Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of political antagonism and social distinction. But the inevitable tropic drift of such meanings also results in an elongation of the term itself, so that sensation as the sensory fi nds itself also associated with sense as signifi cation and sensation as the sensationalized. More radically, this elongation necessitates a reimagination of sensation as a non-physical event also not neces- sarily understood in either mental or idealized terms.