{"id":2548,"date":"2019-09-08T17:12:08","date_gmt":"2019-09-08T17:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2548"},"modified":"2019-09-09T18:29:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T18:29:06","slug":"five-questions-james-wood-on-anecdotes-of-enlightenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2548","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: James Wood on Anecdotes of Enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

James Wood is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of East Anglia<\/a>.\u00a0 He has degrees from Victoria University of Wellington and Stanford University, and worked as an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin before joining UEA.\u00a0 He has published essays and articles on authors including John Dryden, Samuel Richardson, William Wordsworth, Daniel Defoe and William Molyneux, covering topics including sociability, embodiment, periodical culture and the representation of travel.\u00a0 His first book, Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth<\/em><\/a>, which we discuss below, was published in July 2019 by the University of Virginia Press.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in anecdotes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I arrived at graduate school in the US, I didn\u2019t know what I\u2019d be doing as a dissertation project.\u00a0 But I\u2019d been interested in the New Historicist anecdote from taking a seminar on literary theory back in New Zealand, where we read two chapters from Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s and Catherine Gallagher\u2019s Practicing New Historicism<\/em>.\u00a0 I remember being impressed with what the anecdote could do in an essay: how it could enable these counterintuitive leaps between an apparently irrelevant artefact from the past and a canonical work of literature.\u00a0 At that time, I felt sceptical of Greenblatt\u2019s and Gallagher\u2019s explanation of why the anecdote \u201cworked\u201d in critical essays, which for them has to do with the way the anecdote allows for a defamiliarizing encounter with the past in all its strangeness.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure if I would have been able to articulate it at the time, but I\u2019ve come to think that the power of the anecdote has to do with its specific formal qualities: its smallness and apparent self-containedness, its lack of connection or explanation.\u00a0 The anecdote tends to pose an enigma, a problem to be solved.<\/p>\n

So the anecdote was on my mind when I arrived at Stanford to do a PhD.\u00a0 At that time a lot of graduate students were especially excited about the work of Alex Woloch, who had recently published his book on minor characters in the nineteenth-century novel.\u00a0 Several graduate students were doing projects that were positioned against a kind of historicism presumed to be hostile or indifferent to form.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t necessarily see a conflict between the New Historicism and what was starting to be called the \u201cNew Formalism.\u201d\u00a0 But the intellectual climate of Stanford certainly shaped the project.\u00a0 I suppose all first books are influenced by the universities at which they were written in one way or another.\u00a0 The way Woloch writes about minor characters as distorted replicas of real human beings, who either explode out of the text in one disruptive moment or repeat the same aberrant behaviour again and again, fed into my thinking about the anecdote as a genre that relies on repetition for its effect as well as singularity.<\/p>\n

So my interest in the anecdote came from a fascination with form.\u00a0 I was\u2014and am\u2014interested in the thought process behind literary criticism and I carried that interest back into the eighteenth century and its miscellaneous writing on philosophy, travel, history, and social behaviour that tends to go under \u201cnon-fictional prose\u201d\u2014not that that is a very satisfactory term!\u00a0 I wanted to explore how anecdotes worked in the great stew of writings on the human that the eighteenth century produced.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2) Your book examines ‘the enlightening potential of parafactual stories’.\u00a0 For you, what are the most important manners in which anecdotes facilitated new thinking in the long eighteenth century?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that the awareness that anecdotes were parafactual made them central to the playful and sceptical intellectual style that characterizes much Enlightenment writing on human nature.\u00a0 Writers tend to show an awareness that the anecdotes they tell might<\/em> be true but almost certainly are not and in any case they probably distort or exaggerate the truth.\u00a0 Anecdotes are stories that initially appear to be grounded in actual human life, but the awareness that they are anecdotes also tends to detach the stories away from actual human life into a hypothetical or suppositional realm.\u00a0 The generic contract between the anecdote teller and tellee makes a certain latitude with the truth acceptable.<\/p>\n

This sense of the anecdote being a free-floating story that nevertheless retains a persistent yet fragile connection to actual human life allowed it to become a kind of plaything of the mind.\u00a0 So the power of the anecdote for me is not that it produces certain empirically grounded knowledge of human nature.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost exactly the opposite: the anecdote becomes a starting point from which to test out possibilities for conceiving human nature.\u00a0 One advantage of the anecdote was that it did not presume anything about human nature in advance, so it helped Enlightenment writers think about the human as if from first principles.\u00a0 They also helped focus thinkers\u2019 attention on delimited aspects of human nature rather than obliging them to develop a theory accounting for everything pertaining to the human beforehand.<\/p>\n

The anecdote was also readily \u201csharable\u201d\u2014here it is hard not to think about the little pictures, videos, and stories that \u201cgo viral\u201d on the internet\u2014and I\u2019m especially interested in how key Enlightenment anecdotes like the anecdote of Polly Baker keep getting interpreted and reinterpreted.\u00a0 Anecdotes moved easily between orality and print, providing focal points for the conversations and debates about the human that animated the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3) Your four chapters study successively a form (the essay), an author (David Hume), an event (the voyage of theEndeavour<\/em>) and a collection (Lyrical Ballads<\/em>).\u00a0 How did you come to select this approach and these particular case studies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The general structure of the dissertation was in place quite early in the writing.\u00a0 To be honest, when I was writing the introduction I noticed that the different chapters did have a different principle of organisation so I decided to highlight that\u2014though it wasn\u2019t really an idea to take a different principle of organisation for each chapter from the beginning.\u00a0 I had a biographical affinity for many of the authors and topics: William Wordsworth from my early childhood just outside the Lake District, the Endeavour<\/em> voyage from growing up in New Zealand, David Hume for the stories of social awkwardness I enjoyed reading in Ernest C. Mossner\u2019s biography.\u00a0 I had been fascinated by the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele from taking Denise Gigante\u2019s seminar.\u00a0 That general plan of organisation worked well in that I discovered plenty of material to keep me going.\u00a0 I found a photocopy of a manuscript entitled \u201cBanksiana\u201d in the British Library that was full of Banks anecdotes and looking at the \u201cBoswelliana\u201d in the Houghton Library gave me the perfect transition from the David Hume chapter to the Endeavour<\/em> chapter: an anecdote about a friendly argument between Hume and Alexander Erskine, 3rd Earl of Kellie about whether human nature is one or many in the aftermath of the tales about Tahiti carried back to England by James Cook and company.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4) What do you think that Romanticists in particular might gain by paying more attention to the culture of the anecdote during the Enlightenment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m tempted to turn the question around and ask what Enlightenment scholars have to learn from the Romantic culture of the anecdote!\u00a0 I think it is fair to say that there has been more work done on the anecdote as a literary genre by Romanticists than by scholars whose centre of gravity is the period before 1790: James Chandler, Kevis Goodman, Alan Liu, and David Simpson spring to mind here.\u00a0 An exception is Helen Deutsch in Loving Dr. Johnson<\/em>, who I feared for a while had pipped me to the post on the anecdote.\u00a0 I ended up going in a quite different direction to Deutsch, however.\u00a0 I became interested in the way the universal abstraction of the human as such gets thought about through the concrete and aberrant particularity of the anecdote.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m struck that it is the 1790s that the anecdote begins to be theorized as such, with Isaac D\u2019Israeli\u2019s A Dissertation on Anecdotes<\/em> (1793) and Novalis\u2019 very brief but extremely suggestive remarks on the anecdote in his unpublished Logological Fragments<\/em> (c.1798-1800).\u00a0 I think that one thing that Romanticists could take from these writings on the anecdote is that for both D\u2019Israeli and Novalis the anecdote is not necessarily a historical genre\u2014in the sense that it tells us something about history or historical characters.\u00a0 D\u2019Israeli and Novalis are, of course, interested in how the anecdote can be introduced into a work of history.\u00a0 But they also emphasize the usefulness of the anecdote in telling us something about human nature or getting us to think about the human differently.\u00a0 One of the aims of the book is to try to get people to see the anecdote as one of the key genres through which writers in both the Enlightenment and Romantic periods thought about the human.\u00a0 I\u2019d be delighted if the book helped stimulate more work on that function of the anecdote in a moment when Enlightenment moral philosophy was beginning to break up into the human sciences.<\/p>\n

I hope too that the project might stimulate more work on the Romantic-era essay, which maintains strong links to its eighteenth-century precursors.\u00a0 I\u2019d also be delighted if the book in some small way helps foster more work on Romantic narrative poetry, especially poetry by women writers.\u00a0 One of my regrets in the book is that I didn\u2019t really have space to discuss Mary Robinson\u2019s Lyrical Tales<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019m thinking also of Charlotte Smith\u2019s \u201cOn Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic\u201d\u2014which illustrates, also, how anecdotes are not necessarily about events<\/em> as such but are often more about circumstances<\/em>, real or imagined.\u00a0 (I\u2019m grateful to Jenny Davidson for pointing this out to me.)\u00a0 Smith never sees the lunatic but only imagines him wandering about on the headland and the poem becomes a little micro-world unto itself.<\/p>\n

One of the baneful effects, I think, of Coleridge\u2019s Biographia Literaria<\/em>, is that it has helped contribute to a snootiness about Wordsworth\u2019s anecdotal poetry\u2014it is Wordsworth\u2019s anecdote-poems like \u201cAlice Fell\u201d that Coleridge singles out for censure on the grounds he would have rather had them told to him as prose tales.\u00a0 So I think that taking anecdotes seriously can also help us revalue texts even in the corpus of writings by the \u201cBig Six.\u201d\u00a0 I think that anecdotes are actually very complicated things and we should take them seriously\u2014even when they strike us as silly or absurd.\u00a0 Anecdotes can teach us a lot, I think, about how the category of literature itself was beginning to be defined in the Romantic period.\u00a0 D\u2019Israeli and Novalis seem to see the anecdote as a genre on the threshold of what we would now call \u201cthe literary.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

I\u2019m currently working on a project on the relationship between mental labour and manual labour from John Locke to Mary Shelley.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in how many writers across this period understand their own mental labours as analogous to manual labour.\u00a0 The connection is not simply metaphorical though: writers like Samuel Richardson, the son of a joiner and a working printer, were well acquainted with manual work and emphasize the manual aspects of writing itself.\u00a0 I\u2019ve published an essay (\u201cRichardson\u2019s Hands\u201d) from this new project in Eighteenth-Century Fiction<\/em> and another essay from the project is coming out in the same journal in Spring 2020 (\u201cRobinson Crusoe and the Earthy Ground.\u201d)\u00a0 I\u2019m working on Samuel Johnson at the moment and his \u201cbeating a track through the alphabet\u201d in working on the Dictionary of the English Language<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The nature of the project is taking me in an eco-critical direction which I hadn\u2019t anticipated at the beginning: I\u2019m struck by how many theorists understand manual labour as a process in which human beings seem to fuse with the natural world: so Locke writes of people mixing their labour with the earth and Marx writes of labour as a form of metabolism with nature.\u00a0 I\u2019m excited to find out where else the project leads!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also working on an edition with Ema Vyroubalov\u00e1 of Trinity College Dublin of the manuscript writings of the 18th<\/sup> century writer the Reverend Jermyn Pratt, who was a friend of Christopher Smart, who mentioned Jermyn and his sister Harriet in Jubilate Agno<\/em>.\u00a0 There is a cache of Pratt\u2019s literary writings that I came across in the Norfolk Record Office, many written in his neat hand in marbled notebooks.\u00a0 To be honest he is not much of a poet!\u00a0 But his play set in Norfolk, The Grange<\/em>, is hilarious, as is his Sterne-influenced essay \u201cThe Zgubbs,\u201d about little gremlin-like spirits that mess up best-laid plans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Wood is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of East Anglia.\u00a0 He has degrees from Victoria University of Wellington and Stanford University, and worked as an… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2548"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2558,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548\/revisions\/2558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}