{"id":1782,"date":"2017-10-30T19:43:09","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T19:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1782"},"modified":"2017-10-31T16:32:23","modified_gmt":"2017-10-31T16:32:23","slug":"five-questions-julia-s-carlson-on-romantic-marks-and-measures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1782","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: 2017 BARS First Book Prize Winner Julia S. Carlson on Romantic Marks and Measures"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Julia S. Carlson, the winner of the 2017 BARS First Book Prize<\/a>, is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati<\/a>.\u00a0 She completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and her graduate degrees at the University of Michigan.\u00a0 She has published numerous essays on Romantic poetry, poetics, cartographies and sensation; is a member of the Multigraph Collective, co-authors of the forthcoming Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation<\/i>, 1700-1900<\/em> (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and is one of the co-editors of Romanticism on the Net<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/i>She received the First Book Prize for\u00a0Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth\u2019s Poetry in Fields of Print<\/a><\/i> (Penn Press, 2016), which we discuss below. <\/b><\/p>\n

1) How did you begin the research that led you to write this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My research on this project began after a Comparative Literature seminar in which we read Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s Un Coup de D\u00e9s Jamais N\u2019Abolira Le Hasard<\/em> and the poems of Emily Dickinson followed by a facing-page edition of Wordsworth\u2019s Prelude<\/em>, a sequence which primed me to observe typographic and topographic differences between the 1805 and 1850 texts.\u00a0 Why the abundance of dashes and near absence of exclamation marks in the Norton 1805 Prelude<\/em>, so clearly belied by the original manuscripts, I wondered?\u00a0 Why the late twentieth-century editorial resistance to the mark of passion, and what contemporary ideas and practices shaped Wordsworth\u2019s marking?\u00a0 To explore this question, I went deep into the stacks of Harlan Hatcher Library<\/a> to read surprisingly animated disputes among grammarians, elocutionists, and rhetoricians on the use and significance of the \u201cwondering point,\u201d the \u201cblank line,\u201d and other \u201cTypographical Figures of Speech.\u201d\u00a0 I was interested, too, in the poem\u2019s self-reflexivity: its thematics of marking and attention and its vocabulary of mark<\/em>, point<\/em>, spot<\/em>, line<\/em>, and trace<\/em>\u2014terms used to signal places in the landscape and accent the growth of the poet\u2019s mind.\u00a0 Particularly evident in the episode of crossing the Simplon Pass, these terms for geometric and cartographic symbols made me wonder how the Alps were rendered in period maps and why they\u2019d been neglected in the criticism.\u00a0 This led me to the Map Library<\/a>, with its then panoramic view of the streets, squares, and houses of Ann Arbor, where, with the help of librarian Karl Eric Longstreth, I stood gazing at maps of Switzerland published between 1768 and 1844, struck by the radical shifts in symbol, style, and perspective with which they construed the rivers, roads, and slopes that meet in the narrow confines of the Pass.<\/p>\n

2) Your book positions Wordsworth\u2019s poetry \u2018within a matrix of inscriptional projects not traditionally considered to be part of the Romantic canon: the charting of terrain and the notating of language by cartographers, elocutionists, prosodists, and the writers of tours and guidebooks.\u2019\u00a0 What for you are most significant insights into Wordsworth’s poetry that this positioning reveals, and what do you think are the most important things we can learn about the galaxies of topography and typography that you examine through relating them to Wordsworthian verse?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The notational lexicon Wordsworth uses in composition and revision puts his poems in dialogue with and differentiates them from contemporary visual and verbal grammars, with implications for our understanding of poetic language and form.\u00a0 For example, Wordsworth\u2019s reflexive use of line<\/em> and point<\/em> in The Prelude<\/em>, which registers the scientific, ideological, and aesthetic interests of the Ordnance Survey of Britain, reveals tensions and affinities between the experimental project of epic autobiography and the new cartographic portrait of the nation.\u00a0 Thus we see that the ostensibly more natural language by which Wordsworth\u2019s attempts to inscribe feeling and place is inflected by a technical semiotics, and conversely, that that the retention of hill portraiture in the first series of topographical maps of England and Wales\u2014its expressive pictorialism \u2014is indebted to the Wordsworthian aesthetics of Ruskin and Arnold.<\/p>\n

Poems and maps were highly interactive and formally reinforcing.\u00a0 In another context, that of picturesque tours and guidebooks, short excerpts of long blank verse poems intended to bring nature \u201ccloser to the eye\u201d were published side-by-side with increasingly large-scale charts and outline views of mountain ranges, and also within complex itineraries.\u00a0 My critical cartopoetics<\/em> reveals that what we\u2019ve come to know as Wordsworthian \u201cnature lyric\u201d is not a phenomenon of consciousness that transcends the function of pointing to the landscape, as Geoffrey Hartman has argued.\u00a0 Short blank verse nature poems were formalized in dynamic relation to other line systems, such as surveying and hill portraiture, and within specific indexical and diagrammatic contexts that heightened attention to the marks and measures of landscape and cultivated the interpretation, and correlation, of heterogeneous scales and views.<\/p>\n

The poems\u2019 formalization in the context of sign systems that tried to graph speech patterns\u2014elocutionary punctuation\u2014is revealed in subtle effects such as the double-long dashes that Wordsworth began to use in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads<\/em>.\u00a0 Considered historically, the marks indicate Wordsworth\u2019s experimentation with elocutionary punctuation and his thematic development of elocutionary concerns within the poems.\u00a0 Not merely signs of suspenseful pause or the silent passage of time, however, the marks are iconographic as well\u2014tracings in the print medium of the \u201cfinger of mortality\u201d (\u201cThe Brothers,\u201d 126) that has scored the landscape.\u00a0 As such, they offer countermappings of place, controlling the reader\u2019s movement through the poems and enhancing her affective response to a landscape conventionally, and less meaningfully, marked in the picturesque guidebooks the poems indict.\u00a0 Wordsworth\u2019s reflexive handling of the long dash across the blank verse of the book shows how what Richard Payne Knight called \u201cblank and unmark\u2019d metre\u201d is hardly such, but depends upon a complex interplay of spatiotemporal marks that engage the acoustic and visual imaginations of readers.\u00a0 What we learn, therefore, about the \u201cgalaxies of topography and typography\u201d is that they become, in the period, more interrelated as they strive to be both more systematic and more expressive in their encoding of the national language and landscape.\u00a0 They were related aspects of a diagrammatic and accentual turn in British culture that produced new forms of the spatial and temporal organization of print, new kinds of literacy, and new modes of feeling.<\/p>\n

3) How did you come to decide on the final structure for your book, with three chapters focusing on the burgeoning of cartographic practices pivoting around a transitional interchapter into four further chapters on the marking of language within a thriving print culture?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The topographical and typographical systems through which I was reading Wordsworth are intertwined in his poetry, so it was tempting to consider them together in each chapter.\u00a0 Ultimately, I thought this would make for too dense a narrative, so I explored the graphic representation of landscape in the first half of the book and the graphic representation of speech in the second; the interchapter articulates the two, foregrounding the many connections between them in the culture and in Wordsworth\u2019s verse.<\/p>\n

4) To what extent does your study focus on Wordsworth because he was a poet particularly alive to marks and measures, and to what extent might the approach you take in your book be extended to other poets or literary writers of the period?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wordsworth, the poet who founded his verse on the \u201cplainer and more emphatic language\u201d spoken by rustics who were in daily communication with the enduring objects of nature, was more deeply invested in marking and measuring both landscape and speech than any of his contemporaries.\u00a0 That said, the book also discusses other writers\u2014Coleridge, theorist of punctuation and of \u201cmingled measures\u201d; Southey\u2014poet of experimental meters; Thelwall\u2014teacher of elocution and radical prosodist.\u00a0 There are other poets too for whom the marking of speech on the page is a matter of self-reflexive reference: Byron in Don Juan<\/em> for one.<\/p>\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m co-editing a collection for Cambridge with Sally Bushell and Damian Walford Davies called Romantic Cartographies<\/em>. I\u2019m also co-editing a special issue of Essays in Romanticism<\/em> on historical poetics with David Ruderman and Ewan Jones.\u00a0 And my new monograph project is Reading with the Hands: Impression and Inscription in Romantic-Era Britain<\/em>, which explores, among other things, the development of tactile print systems for the blind.<\/p>\n

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Congratulations to Julia S. Carlson (pictured with Nigel Leask, panel judge) – winner of the BARS Book Prize 2017. pic.twitter.com\/uW7Rq081J9<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Romanticism (@BARS_official) July 28, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n