{"id":598,"date":"2015-03-15T14:04:51","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T14:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=598"},"modified":"2015-03-15T14:04:51","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T14:04:51","slug":"five-questions-ted-underwood-on-why-literary-periods-mattered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=598","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Ted Underwood on Why Literary Periods Mattered"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ted<\/a>Ted Underwood is a Professor and the LAS Centennial Scholar of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<\/a>.\u00a0 His graduate work was in the field of Romanticism and led, among other places, to his first monograph,\u00a0The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760-1860<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 His current research explores the possibilities opened up by digital technologies for working on large collections of texts written over considerable periods of time; some of his recent progress in this area is detailed in his interim report Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Below, we discuss his fascinating book Why Literary Periods Mattered<\/em><\/a>, first published by Stanford University Press in 2013 and now available in paperback.\u00a0 Ted blogs at The Stone and the Shell<\/a> and can be found on Twitter @Ted_Underwood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in the importance of periodisation to the identity of literary studies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting, because the book project started out with a different goal \u2014 more about writers\u2019 emotional investment in historical difference as a paradoxical model of the afterlife.\u00a0 In 2002, when I published an early draft of a chapter in PMLA<\/em>, that was what I expected the book to be about.<\/p>\n

But I also wanted to flesh that intellectual thesis out with a more institutional, social story, and to get that material I did about a month of archival research at the University of London.\u00a0 It was there that I realized this could also be a story about disciplinary<\/em> history, because period survey courses and the historicist afterlife seemed to work in very similar ways.\u00a0 And then, frankly, my editor (Emily-Jane Cohen) and Adam Potkay (one of my readers) encouraged me to keep moving in the direction of disciplinary history.\u00a0 So I ended up dropping a whole chapter on the later nineteenth-century novel and writing a new one on twentieth-century curricula.\u00a0 It improved the book.<\/p>\n

2) When Romanticists think about our predecessors in the period which we classify ourselves as studying, we tend to jump first to writers who are recognisably critical, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt.\u00a0 Your book makes clear that in fact the shape of literary studies has drawn considerably on discourses derived from popular histories (in numerous forms, including charts created by Joseph Priestley) and from the historical novel, most notably the works of Walter Scott, which developed the kinds of contrastive histories which inspired the first periodised English courses.\u00a0 How do you think reclaiming these antecedents helps us better to understand the natures of what we do and what those we study did?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think you\u2019ve phrased this very well.\u00a0 Scholars always like to trace academic genealogies that are internal to their own discipline.\u00a0 We play down the influence of other disciplines, and of broader trends in social and cultural history.\u00a0 You see the same thing in digital humanities right now: there\u2019s a huge pressure to find ancestor figures who were \u201cpioneering humanists.\u201d\u00a0 We play down connections to the social sciences, and to popular enthusiasm about the internet; those genealogies are embarrassing.\u00a0 For me the lesson is to be wary of the power disciplines exert over our imagination.<\/p>\n

3) Why do you think that periodisation has proved to be such a resilient organising principle for English curricula?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here again I\u2019m inclined to emphasize a disciplinary raison d\u2019\u00e9tat.\u00a0 By the twentieth century, a vision of literary history organized around discrete schools and movements had become a really central part of the cultural capital that literature departments were empowered to distribute.\u00a0 Social scientists could argue about causes, and historians could trace continuities, but we had a lock on the discrete quiddities of classicism, romanticism, and so on.\u00a0 I frankly think periodisation endured for what you might call marketing reasons.<\/p>\n

We haven\u2019t always acknowledged this rationale overtly.\u00a0 In the early twentieth century, for instance, the debate played out as a question about \u201ccultivation.\u201d\u00a0 Movements like comparative literature and the history of ideas that tended to weaken emphasis on periodisation were portrayed as too intellectual; they threatened to undermine the cultivation of character that literary education was supposed to produce.\u00a0 But in my view this was, in effect, a high-minded way of saying \u201cYou\u2019re diluting our disciplinary brand.\u201d<\/p>\n

4) How do you think that reducing the emphasis which we place on contrasting periods might benefit English Studies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not at all opposed to teaching period surveys.\u00a0 That kind of focus has value, and it\u2019s something we\u2019re already trained to do well.<\/p>\n

But I do think there are also other things we could be doing.\u00a0 I\u2019m sympathetic to the argument Jo Guldi and David Armitage have been making in The History Manifesto<\/em><\/a>, to the effect that history needs to reclaim its public significance by embracing a longue dur\u00e9e.\u00a0 I suspect that\u2019s also true for literary studies.\u00a0 But I have to admit, I\u2019m not sure I know yet what the public significance of a literary longue dur\u00e9e would look like \u2014 because frankly, I don\u2019t think we understand our longue dur\u00e9e very well yet.\u00a0 This may be a case where we have to do more research before we\u2019ll know what we could be teaching.<\/p>\n

5) Since the book’s publication, how have you been using digital methods to address the ‘blind spots of literary scholarship’ to which periodising models contribute?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a grad student, I thought we basically understood the broad contours of nineteenth-century literary history.\u00a0 You know, romanticism, realism, modernism; the big outlines at least were going to be stable.<\/p>\n

But as digital libraries and quantitative methods make it possible to actually look at a picture composed of thousands of volumes, I and other researchers keep stumbling over broad, continuous trends that don\u2019t line up well with existing periodising concepts.\u00a0 These larger trends don\u2019t necessarily displace a concept like \u201cromanticism\u201d: that\u2019s still a word with real uses.\u00a0 But it\u2019s becoming clear that there are also other scales of literary change that we don\u2019t understand, and may not even have glimpsed.<\/p>\n

In the book I gave one example of a big trend we\u2019ve been blind to \u2014 a linguistic differentiation of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth.\u00a0 I just looked at one aspect of that trend in the book, but I\u2019ve gotten more evidence since then which suggests that the diction of these genres really became more dissimilar overall.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite opposite to the notion I was taught \u2014 that romanticism ended specialized poetic diction, and poetry thereafter became more like other forms of writing.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just one example; there are a lot of people making similar arguments.\u00a0 Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac have a brilliant pamphlet<\/a> about a gradual shift from abstract to concrete language in nineteenth-century fiction.\u00a0 In a recent ALH<\/em> article, Matthew Wilkens has shown<\/a> that geographical emphases in American literature changed more gradually than scholars have thought.\u00a0 Hoyt Long, Richard So, and I recently collaborated on a piece for Slate that traces some long slow changes in the rhetorical function of money in fiction<\/a>.\u00a0 Jordan Sellers and I are at work right now on a piece about the history of literary evaluation, which argues that the literary standards embodied in reviews of poetry remained remarkably stable from 1820 through 1920 \u2014 and when they changed, changed in a direction that remains remarkably consistent over the whole century.\u00a0 This will be coming out in a special issue of MLQ<\/em> that I\u2019m organizing with James English<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I realize this is all going to be controversial, and sometimes our specific claims will turn out to be wrong.\u00a0 But I\u2019m increasingly confident at least about the negative premise of these arguments \u2014 the notion that we don\u2019t already understand literary history at the century-long scale.\u00a0 I am pretty sure we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s potentially a huge opportunity here for grad students, but it\u2019s also unfortunately difficult for students to develop a research project at this scale.\u00a0 It takes interdisciplinary training, and it may also just take more than one pair of hands.\u00a0 The Stanford Literary Lab<\/a> has done a good job of solving these problems; that\u2019s the model I\u2019d like to reproduce at Illinois.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ted Underwood is a Professor and the LAS Centennial Scholar of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.\u00a0 His graduate work was in the field of Romanticism and led,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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\/598"}],"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=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":603,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}