Category Archives: V21 and ASECS

Forster’s Synchronism and 18th-Century Studies

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In the preface to The Rape of Clarissa, Terry Eagleton embraces, under the sign of Benjamin, a strategic presentism (though this is not his phrase) that understands the work of criticism to be a kind of textual recovery.  Literature long thought unreadable can, under the critic’s care, be revived for a new readership if we can only see how it speaks to the politics of the present moment.  This is what I take Eagleton to mean when, writing in 1982, he claims, “we may now once again be able to read Samuel Richardson.” [1]

Eagleton’s “we” who are newly able to read Richardson surely refers not to scholars of the eighteenth century—who had, of course, been reading Richardson all along—but to a more capacious, perhaps even a non-academic readership.  And “read” means something bigger, too.  Again, eighteenth-century scholars had been reading Clarissa, but not in a way that took its project seriously, not in a way that understood its urgency.  In bringing Clarissa back from the dead, Eagleton opposes his method to a conservative historicism:  “I entirely lack what would appear to be one of the chief credentials for discussing the eighteenth century,” he writes, “namely a nostalgic urge to return to it.” [2]

Eagleton can seem almost prophetic now:  he either divined correctly that the world was ready again for Clarissa or, along with Terry Castle and, not much later, Frances Ferguson (among others), he made it ready.  But I begin with him not because I see him as the first to release this salvo but because I want to suggest that there has long (perhaps always) been an eighteenth-century studies that has situated itself against a more conservative, historicist eighteenth-century studies.  This is perhaps why many of us were so thrilled to read the V21 Manifesto when it was published:  we greeted its writers less as provocateurs than as fellow-travelers.  I offer a capsule pre-history of strategic presentism not to suggest that it has run its course but to propose what I hope we might consider as a friendly competitor in the push against the kind of conservative nostalgia Eagleton names.  If, as the manifesto claims, “the variations of and alternatives to presentism as such have not yet been adequately described or theorized,” I hope to offer an early step toward that effort here.

Rather than (or perhaps alongside of) strategic presentism, I’ve been thinking lately about a model of synchronism (maybe even a naïve synchronism) that would allow for connections between moments of historical time without even the minimal historical apparatus that presentism requires.  In one of the early responses to the V21 Manifesto, David Kurnick urges us to revisit old formalisms before we craft new ones, and, in that spirit, I want to suggest that one valuable old formalist contribution to our present critical conversation is E. M. Forster’s curious synchronous thinking about the novel’s form. [3]  Here’s a brief passage from a part of Aspects of the Novel that no one really reads:

We are to envision the English novelists not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room—all writing their novels simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think, ‘I live under Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Trollope, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley.’  [4]

Forster imagines the British Museum reading room as populated by the great authors of the English novel, paired at tables in a kind of formalist buddy system.  The pairings that Forster conjures with his thought experiment (Richardson and James, Dickens and Wells, Sterne and Woolf) may strike us as rather obvious, but the experiment itself is not.  Our understanding of novel theory has, perhaps since its inception, been inextricably linked to an historical account of the novel’s emergence and development, however contested the parameters and particulars of that history may be.  Consider the ubiquity of the pairing “the history and theory of the novel” in both our scholarship and teaching, or the subtitle of the most commonly assigned anthology in the subfield:  Michael McKeon’s The Theory of the Novel:  An Historical Approach.

While much new formalist work on novel theory has advocated either for new histories or for a strategic presentism that simply runs history in reverse, Forster offers a formalist literary history without the history.  Forster posits a view of the English novel as simultaneously generated—a flattening not of character but of time.  It subordinates temporality as such to the spatial, enabling, I think, what Anna Kornbluh has called, “enhanced attention to the worldmaking project of fictional space and to literary realism as the production of possible spaces rather than the document of existing places.” [5]  (Indeed, I suspect that Forster’s model might do this better than presentism).

In writing at a table alongside Forster, I’m not claiming to invent anything, but I do want to connect and elevate work as diverse as that of Susan Sontag (see “Notes on Camp”:  especially her use of lists that can commingle, for example, Walpole, Wilde, and “stag films seen without lust”), James Chandler, whose An Archeology of Sympathy pings from Frank Capra to Laurence Sterne to I. A. Richards, and Scott Black, whose writing on romance and anachronism takes up what he has called “a looser sense of history.”  The affordances of synchronism are, in brief:

1.)  it offers a less abashed formalism.

2.)  it opens up the potential for a kind of cross-period collaboration that is truly rare in our discipline.

3.)  it leverages so much of the work that we already do, in our classrooms especially, but also in the kind of irreverent, energetic (semi-)public writing that is flourishing at the moment, both in venues like The Hairpin (RIP), The Toast (RIP), and the LA Review of Books but also ABOPublic and The 18th-Century Common.  And this is perhaps especially true for our colleagues in the precariat, our graduate students and adjunct faculty, who are constantly being called to extend outside of narrow training, to bring their expertise to bear more broadly than ever.

In sum, I want to suggest that Forster’s synchronism offers a model for thinking about the novel without the silos of periodization, at a moment when we’ve largely embraced formalist methodology only up to the limits of established, field-based historical parameters.  It doesn’t encourage us to abandon the eighteenth century, but instead offers us an eighteenth century not just for the present, but for all time and all possible futures.

Notes

[1]  Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa:  Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson.  (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xii.

[2]  Eagleton, xiii-ix.

[3]  http://v21collective.org/responses-to-the-v21-manifesto-2/#response2

[4]  E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927).  (New York:  Harvest Books, 1955), 9.

[5] Anna Kornbluh, “Present Tense Futures of the Past,” in “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism,” Victorian Studies 59.1 (Autumn, 2016):  98-101.

For the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference program, Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski chaired a roundtable responding to the V21 Collective’s intervention in nineteenth-century studies and the possibilities it presented for reflecting on current problems and critical approaches in eighteenth-century studies.  Additional contributions to the roundtable can be found here.

“Strategic Presentism” and 18th-Century Studies

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My deepest thanks to Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski for having me on this panel alongside this great lineup of people I admire.  It’s a pleasure to have Anna Kornbluh here to help us think through what V21 might have to offer us working in the eighteenth century.  A little about myself and my connection to V21:  I’m totally one of those scholars that pushes the “long” part of the “long 18th and 19th centuries,” but this in-betweenness has forced me to think a lot about my scholarly investments in working across these historical periods and how sometimes periodization limits the questions we can ask and the objects with which we might engage critically.  I connected with V21 through one of my dissertation committee members, Emily Steinlight, and I have since contributed to one of V21’s Collations, an online forum that brings together two to three scholars, often with very different intellectual interests and at entirely different stages of their careers, to read and respond to new scholarship in the field. [1]  V21’s openness to what its Manifesto calls “multiple modalities of scholarship and collectivity” has been extremely exciting to me as someone who has been working through what ways we might reach beyond the academic audiences of journals and monographs. [2]  Today, I want to reflect a bit on the limits and affordances of the V21 Collective’s concept of “strategic presentism.”

I can’t help but return to Lynn Hunt’s 2002 short essay, “Against Presentism,” written for the American Historical Association. [3]  For Hunt, presentism risks “putting historians out of business” by reducing history to a study of sameness based on the search for our individual or collective roots of identity.  Furthermore, she describes the worst presentism as a kind of “moral complacency and self-congratulation” perpetuated by scholars who try to claim the righteous high ground over the archaic, problematic past.  In Hunt’s view, presentism leads to a kind of selective history that sees what it wants to see because it wants to shore up “various kinds of identity politics” that might be better attended to by “sociology, political science, and ethnic studies.”  “We are all caught up in the ripples of time, and we have no idea of where they are headed,” Hunt concludes.

I find myself perplexed by this assessment.  I think the urgency to act and respond in our current turbulent political climate is born out of the fact that we as humanists do know where things are headed precisely because we work to understand how and why events in history have unfolded as they have.  What really is the problem with finding sameness in the past?  Why does continuity necessarily mean “temporal superiority,” as Hunt puts it?  In my understanding, opposing presentism doesn’t get politics out of history.  To quote Eric Rauchway,

Writing about the past as if it existed wholly on its own terms and did not lead to the present suggests that history is utterly useless today—a cozy pursuit that cannot disturb our assumptions about what is happening now.  It makes history marvelously conservative…  After all, all history gets written by someone, somewhen.  Our paths to the past start in the present.  A tiny sliver—and never a representative cross-section—of humanity has access to research libraries and proprietary databases, to publishers, to income and leisure time sufficient to pursue history as profession or avocation.  [4]

Pretending that historians are detached from present circumstance, for Rauchway at least, seems no more than pretense.  Now, I don’t know if I would go so far as to frame history as such a teleological enterprise that makes all lines converge on our present, but I do think there’s a disavowal of presentist commitments in the claim that we “study the 18th century for the 18th century’s sake and only on its terms.”  If we ask our undergraduates to answer the “stakes” question in their own thinking and writing, why are we not beholden to that same question?  I think students deserve an honest and nuanced answer to the question of why does this matter.  (It just is and because I said so don’t count).  Framing it in terms of the present that they know not only encourages students to discover unexpected investments in what they’re learning but also witnesses history as itself dynamic, living—perpetually rippling into our present and beyond, to repurpose Hunt’s image.

The first thesis of the “Manifesto of the V21 Collective” takes to task Victorian Studies for having “fallen prey to positivist historicism, a mode of inquiry that aims to do little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past.”  While I’ve heard a number of colleagues over the past day or two insist on the value of this ever-thickening description of the past, I think what is strategic about “strategic presentism” is that it demands that we “think critically about the past in the present in order to change the present.” [5]  I emphasize “change” because not only are we fleshing out continuities but also learning to better conceptualize those continuities as the means by which we can begin to imagine different futures in a present that so often seems to be without a future (or at least a viable or sustainable one).  I am also particularly taken with Anna’s formulation of “active listening to the past.” [6]  In our eagerness to describe, to inhabit, to reproduce, to contextualize the voices of the past (even to the extent that we sometimes talk over them), what are we training ourselves to hear, to tune out, or even fail to hear all together?

We have always been presentist, Emily Steinlight frequently likes to remind me. [7]  No, not all presentisms are created equal, nor are all presentisms strategic.  But we are shaped and motivated by the conditions of the present, whether or not we acknowledge it.  The act of scholarship is shaped and motivated by the conditions of the present, whether or not we acknowledge it.  The institutions within which we work are shaped and motivated by the conditions of the present, whether or not we acknowledge it.

And I don’t think we should be ashamed of that.

Notes

[1]  My collations contribution was on the book forum for Benjamin Morgan’s The Outward Mind:  Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.  The forum was composed of reflections by Elisha Cohn (Cornell), Kate Flint (University of Southern California), and myself.

[2]  See Thesis 10 of the Manifesto of the V21 Collective.

[3]  Lynn Hunt.  “Against Presentism.”  Perspectives on History.  May 1, 2002.

[4]  “Present Tense.”  The New Republic, 2007.

[5] David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale.  “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism:  Introduction.”  Victorian Studies 59.1 (2016):  88.

[6] “Present Tense Futures of the Past.”  “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism:  Introduction.”  Victorian Studies 59.1 (2016):  100.

[7] “We Have Always Been Presentist.”  “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism:  Introduction.”  Victorian Studies 59.1 (2016):  105.

For the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference program, Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski chaired a roundtable responding to the V21 Collective’s intervention in nineteenth-century studies and the possibilities it presented for reflecting on current problems and critical approaches in eighteenth-century studies.  Additional contributions to the roundtable can be found here.

The “Ordinary Science” of Literary Studies

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When V21 and the V21 manifesto first appeared a few years ago, I was very excited and something of a cheerleader from the sidelines of social media.  Who doesn’t like a group of younger scholars standing up and telling the older generation that it has gotten it all wrong?  And at the time and still to this day, I’m supportive of anyone in literary studies who is irritated by historicist orthodoxy—the orthodoxy of the baby boom generation that taught me, and against which scholars like my friend Sandra Macpherson and I have been grating for some time.  That and the interest in form and aesthetics, the demand for more conceptually grounded criticism, all seemed and still seem terrific.  So, go V21!  I said that then, and I’ll say that now.

For today’s roundtable, Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski asked us to consider a question.  Does ASECS need its own version of V21?  Given what I just said, my answer may be a bit surprising.  It is no, or a qualified no, or a no, not really, or a no but also in one specific, lower case way yes.  The V21 manifesto advocated for a turn away from what it called “positivist historicism” toward theory (especially) and form (sort of, really more of a turn to that catch all chimera “new formalism”).  I have had a lot to say in print lately about the category of form, so I won’t belabor that just now, except to say that V21 in practice I think turned out to be less interested in form than it purported to be, or was unable or unwilling to distinguish form from politics and so from the history it ostensibly wanted to bracket.  (I believe Sandra Macpherson is going to have more to say about this.  I’m echoing some of her own ideas as well as some of what Anahid Nersessian and I had to say last year in our Critical Inquiry article “Form and Explanation” and in the subsequent exchanges that article produced).  So I won’t say much more about that now.  But I do want to note how the broad currents of this kind of talk and these kinds of debates, that is the broad currents of what the V21 manifesto was after—the limits of archivism and historicism, reconsiderations of form and formalism, possibilities for presentism—have run strong in eighteenth-century studies for some time.  In fact they have run parallel with, if not preceded, conversations our Victorianist colleagues have been having.  I argued in my SEL year’s work in review essay of 2010, for example, that “historicism had perhaps run its course” and that not only did it fail to provide a rationale for what we do but that that best work I had read seemed to be cutting against the historicist grain.  Just after that, ASECS had the first of several panels on form, another on close reading, and soon after that Sandra Macpherson’s notorious, “against history” panel, colloquially named by everyone there as simply “fuck history.”  This discussion continues apace, tracking and anticipating developments in the profession at large (lately over method—method being the great common discussion of our present moment, that is, how we read, why, following what disciplinary protocols or points of style, etc.).  So when I say “no,” I’m saying in part that I think we don’t need our own manifesto to keep the conversation alive.

As far as I’m concerned, moreover, a kind of anti-manifesto pluralism and respect for heterogeneity and the work of others better fits our straightened times.  Despite my opening gambit about youth movements, about impatience with orthodoxies, historicist or otherwise, all of which I believe entirely, I’ve never liked telling people to stop doing what they’re doing, or when anyone else does that either.  Every time I come to ASECS I’m just bowled over by the commitments our colleagues bring to whatever corner of the world commands their interest, whether that’s Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” or the development of the conversation piece or the history of calico.

I’ve come to think that heterogeneity and pluralism within the field of literary studies is essential to a defense of the field of literary studies, considered as a discipline with its own way of accounting for the world, its own distinctive methods and points of style, its own way of telling truths about the parts of the world with which it is concerned.  I think if you peel back from the surface divisions that might be expressed in manifesto-language you find a bed of common method, common purpose, and common explanatory rigor variously expressed in diverse form.  I’ve come to call this the “ordinary science” of literary studies, and I think it ought to be defended, given especially the perilous state of the discipline, given that is the existential threat to the humanities, to literary studies, and to the study of older periods, the eighteenth century one among them.

In preparatory chat over email among the panelists and co-chairs, and in the chatter at the conference over just the past day and a half, I’ve been again excited by all the talk about presentism, perhaps the piece of the V21 program most currently in circulation, that is currently, this very second.  Again, I think there’s much to commend here, and I’ve found the high-caliber discussion of models of historical time and past-present relations done under the auspices of V21 quite thrilling.  The desire here seems palpable:  Who doesn’t want to find ways to address our deplorable political moment with resources from the materials we know well?  And, given the overall context of shrinking enrollments, shrinking resources, and the sense that our materials can be a hard sell, who doesn’t want to find a way to get students interested in older works by teaching them in such a way that makes them seem relevant or, well, relatable?  Having said that, I do want to sound a counter note to the desire for presentism, however, not in the name of antiquarianism or positivism, but merely to underscore the context of disciplinary expertise and common explanatory method that makes presentism curious.  The making of things relevant risks, as I think we sometimes see, a kind of default to intelligent banter about urgent contemporary issues, from climate change to #metoo to of course Trumpism.  None of us have any particular expertise in these issues.  Rather, we bring our expertise and our methods of explanation to political or ethical matters as they take shape in materials with which we are intimately familiar and about which we have something to say particular to our expertise and training.  This ought to put some interesting limits on the desire to make everything present, or on how we think about the quiddity of our objects of concern, located as they are in some discrete temporal corner of the universe.  At the very least, we ought to be cautious I think about the critique of periodization that comes along for the ride of presentism, strategic or otherwise.  For reasons that should be obvious to anyone paying attention to what’s happening in English departments across the academy, now is a bad time to be getting rid of periods.  It just leads to the question, who needs an eighteenth-centuryist anyway?

With these sorts of institutional matters in mind I want to close on an upbeat note, the part that is a qualified or lower case “yes” to Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski’s question.  What V21 as a loose network has excelled at it seems to me is providing platforms for intellectual exchange and scholarly community.  Their various seminars, online fora, meet ups, conferences, book symposia, and so on have been, so far as I can tell, a real boon for scholars of the period.  ASECS really should emulate that.  We need semi-formal occasions and platforms for discussion about the texts and topics that matter to us.  I think it would be terrific if our exchange with the V21 collective today led to some emulating on our part of their infrastructural prowess, modest but real achievements like summer reading groups or online colloquies about recent books in the field, get togethers outside of the annual organizational ones.  This would be a great thing indeed.

For the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference program, Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski chaired a roundtable responding to the V21 Collective’s intervention in nineteenth-century studies and the possibilities it presented for reflecting on current problems and critical approaches in eighteenth-century studies.  Additional contributions to the roundtable can be found here.

“Dialectical Presentism”: Race, Empire, and Slavery in 18th-Century Studies

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Like many of you, I’ve followed the V21 developments with much interest and excitement, if I’ve largely done so from the margins (this is the first time I’ve been a part of any formal discussion about V21).  There are so many things to commend and discuss about the manifesto and the published symposia, roundtable discussions, and essays that are out in the world now (particularly V21’s visions for institutional critique, which I hope we can talk more about in our discussion but which I’m actually not going to talk about now); what I do want to talk about is V21’s call for “strategic presentism” and how it relates to my vantage point in 18th-century studies.  The term itself, which of course recalls Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” is, as I understand it, an attempt to retrieve presentism from the charge of anachronistic projection (a reading of the present uncritically into the past and a collapsing of historical identity and difference) and to redeploy it as a way to signal how the past informs the present, is at work in the present, and how the present shapes itself according to this examined past.  While this sounds all well and good, I have to admit that, as I have been trying to follow the V21 collective’s adventures, I just keep getting stuck here at this concept (stuck as in stunned or perplexed).  Is this really a problem for 18th-century studies?  Do we need a strategic presentism to signal the urgency and relevancy of our field?

I think my stuckness has everything to do with where I am situated in the broader field—race, empire, and slavery studies.  I can’t really speak for the whole of 18th-century studies (although I’d like to have conversations about this whole today), but the field of slavery studies is shot through with strategic presentism.  I think this concept (and the need for it) was puzzling to me, because it’s something so obvious in slavery studies.  Race, empire, and slavery have a certain almost irrefutable significance in the present.  I mean, not only does it instantly signal a special kind of monstrousness if one doesn’t understand the present import of studying the history and representations of race, empire, and slavery, but also these things have such clear, obvious, well-articulated afterlives in the present that seem redundant to even mention (which I could mention, but the point is that I don’t have to).  And 18th-century scholars of slavery are really adept at making these strategically presentist moves in their research, teaching, discussions, works in progress, etc.  Just in the two race, empire, and slavery panels I went to yesterday, for instance, (one on Ramesh Mallipeddi’s Spectacular Suffering:  Witnessing Slavery in the 18th-century British Atlantic and one on “Life and Death in and across Race and Empire”) the following issues were raised:  how the form and logics of 18th-century abolition continues to affect our thinking today (the upshot:  we’re stuck in abolitionist paradigms, help … we need new paradigms!), the untapped potential for 18th-century philosophers of moral sentiment (Hume, Smith, etc.) as models for deploying sentiment as crisis management and for creating a vocabulary and paradigm to deal with what certain bad historical actors are doing to harm fellow humans (and how to stop them), the continuities of the relationship between 18th-century discourses of displacement (one example being restoration rewritings of The Aeneid) and the current Mediterranean migration crisis (Charlotte Sussman’s talk), and Swift’s Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels and drone warfare (Peter DeGabriele’s talk).  This morning’s roundtable on presentism (“Mind ‘Yore’ Business? Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Problem of Presentism”) offered up even more examples:  Al Coppola’s paper on the persistence of Newtonian enlightenment assumptions in the present, specifically how our blind faith in universal laws undergirds popular scientific studies like Geoffrey West’s Scale, and Grace Rexroth’s paper on 18th-century typography, neuroscience, and MRI memory studies.  And I could go on…

If anything, there’s too much presentism in race, empire, and slavery studies.  What we risk is not just misreading the texts of our past and what they can offer us in our present but a misapprehension of the present as well (more on this in a minute).  I don’t think the answer is a return to reductionist historicist paradigms (those that V21, I think, are usefully critiquing) but a dialectical presentism, a presentism that can hold the past and present at once, that can account for an interdependence of identity and difference, that can project a future out of this mess and tangle of conjunction and disjunction.  This need for but also demonstration of such a dialectical presentism came up for me in one of these aforementioned panels from yesterday when Suvir Kaul made a comment about how he thinks the Black Lives Matters Movement is influencing his teaching of the 18th-century.  The example he gave was of a student in one of his courses who was essentially waiting all semester to get to Equiano’s Narrative, only to express profound disappointment once there and declaring it accommodationist, not seeing it as a narrative of self-making as he was hoping she would.  Now, as we were discussing at the panel, to some degree the Narrative is accommodationist, but it’s also self-making and non-accommodationist, but we perhaps see only the former and have this kind of disillusioned feeling and reaction because we’re expecting Equiano to belong to a certain black community that exists today (our imagination of this kind of continuity of black collectivity is the thing Stephen Best critiques in his 2012 essay “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” which we also discussed).  Such a need for dialectical presentism also comes up in my own work, which is, among other things, about what the study of servitude and slavery (and its relationship) can tell us about the present, in particular what it can tell us about the history of race as a concept—that race is an ideological concept that we made and that we have representations of its making, which, of course, means that it can be unmade.  But in order for it (and racism) to be unraveled in the present, we have to recognize that it wasn’t always like this, that race was not a settled, congealed category in the worlds of (especially early) 18th-century texts.  Distance and difference are necessary in our present in order to understand the past, the present itself, and to work for a different kind of future.  So, presentism is a problem, and I think that, if we are to use it strategically, then it must be a dialectical one, so why not call it that?

One question that Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski asked in their call for this roundtable is whether or not the 18th century offers different approaches to the problems V21 so deftly lays out.  In some respects, I think that’s what I’m trying to get at.  Perhaps the 18th century is uniquely situated as a field to see the need for some form of dialectical presentism.  As I see it, our period is one of emergence, a period that showcases the simultaneous identity and difference of a host of now intelligible modern categories (and ones that are perhaps more settled in the 19th century), whether we’re talking about race, the novel, the author, the nation, the bourgeois subject, or sexuality, etc.  The 18th century is strategically positioned to show us how things are made (and how they can be unmade) if we can figure out how to let it, and I think its transitional character gives us a useful model for understanding the dialectical relationship between our present and our past as we try to work for new futures.

For the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference program, Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski chaired a roundtable responding to the V21 Collective’s intervention in nineteenth-century studies and the possibilities it presented for reflecting on current problems and critical approaches in eighteenth-century studies.  Additional contributions to the roundtable can be found here.

ASECS and V21 Roundtable Organizers’ Response: Collective Ways Forward
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When we put out the call for participants on this roundtable, we asked whether eighteenth-century studies needed its own V21 moment, but we must confess that in thinking about the relationship between the two communities, we found ourselves wondering, instead, whether V21 needs eighteenth-century studies.  Many eighteenth-centuryists—as Katarzyna Bartoszynska noted while attending the inaugural V21 Symposium—will have read many of the texts and theorists whose names circulate in Victorian Studies, but can the same be said of work in our field, for scholars outside of it?  Could the more idiosyncratic status of eighteenth-century literature within literary studies account for the fact that some of what V21 identifies as pressing problems for Victorianists do not similarly trouble scholarship in our field?  Presentism, for instance:  not only do we not shy away from presentism, we are in fact continuously called upon to articulate the bearing our texts, and our work, have on the present, if only to persuade students to read it.

For some time, many of us in eighteenth-century studies—as reflected in the institution of the “long eighteenth century”—have proceeded with an arguably irreverent approach to historical periodization, encroaching on both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in order to posit wide-ranging (or what some anonymous reviewers have described as “recklessly broad”) theoretical arguments.  We routinely reach to material beyond the historical eighteenth century to think about what we nevertheless consider “eighteenth-century problems.”  This tendency was observable in the roundtable:  we were struck by how little mention there was of eighteenth-century texts.  Rather than rely primarily on eighteenth-century thinkers to frame their approach to the V21 manifesto, panelists turned, for instance, to E. M. Forster and Matthew Arnold (though, to be fair, Sandra Macpherson emphasized how much Arnold is relying on Burke).  On the one hand, this reaffirmed our sense that dix-huitiemistes are voracious readers who eagerly join in the kinds of “multi-field and multi-disciplinary conversations” that the V21 manifesto calls for.  As Stephanie Insley Hershinow points out, a kind of “naïve synchronism” has served many of us well, particularly in the classroom, and may be leveraged to foster not only good scholarship but also new forms of public writing; such an approach could elevate and “bring in” the kinds of nimble thinking the academic precariat is already being asked to do, but without institutional recognition.  But if we want Victorianists and other specialists outside our field to reciprocate with an occasional deep dive into our texts—the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century, as well as scholarship on it—who would we point them to?

Secondly—and these responses may reveal to V21-ists how people outside the field see them!—we had not expected presentism to be such a central point in the conversation.  Indeed, of all the issues raised in the V21 manifesto, this seemed like the one least troubling to eighteenth-centuryists (though, with the contorted logic of the psyche, this may well be precisely why everyone was drawn to it).  Carrying the conversation forward, it seems clear to us that beyond the question of presentist methods (strategic or not), we must also continue to think about the critical reassessment of antiquarianism and uncritical historicism, both within the eighteenth century and in our studies of it; the fear of our work not being compelling to scholars outside the discipline; the call for more rigorous theorizing, and for not opposing history and theory); the rethinking of form and formalism, including what Jonathan Kramnick describes as “form detached from politics,” and its relationship to an understanding of literary form, in Sandra Macpherson’s words, as “politics by another means.”  While, as several panelists argued, eighteenth-century studies is already doing a lot of the things V21 calls for, and has done them well, we must commit not only to continuing in these paths but also to doing other and better work as well.  How might we more effectively converse across fields and disciplines?  How do we generate multiple modalities and new institutional frameworks?  And, crucially for many of us engaged in this conversation, what is the relationship between these approaches and the mandate to assess academia and its projects in light of both colonization and decolonization?

The wonderful responses of the panelists strongly suggest that eighteenth-century texts and scholars offer a rich resource for the robust theorization of presentism—a commitment to recognizing how the pressures of the present generate both the past and the future as epistemological objects—and an excellent model of synthetic thinking and dialogue between fields.  As Jonathan Kramnick points out, when it comes to present-day matters, none of us has any particular expertise.  Rather, “we bring our expertise and our methods of explanation to political or ethical matters as they take shape in materials with which we are intimately familiar and about which we have something to say particular to our expertise and training.”  Travis Chi Wing Lau urges us to consider how even historicist knowledges are presentist formations, since expertise is forged within the conditions of the present.  Rather than disavow the “present in the past,” he argues, we must attend to how we “listen” to the past from our own particular, present positions:  “what are we training ourselves to hear, to tune out, or even fail to hear all together?”  Laura E. Martin draws attention to the unique quality of the eighteenth-century materials on which our expertise is focused, namely, that we recognize them as works-in-progress, simultaneously different and similar to present phenomena, having not yet coalesced into their more familiar forms.  Where the V21 Manifesto asserts that “we are Victorian,” Laura E. Martin shows us that it is because of the ways in which we are not of the eighteenth century that the “transitional character [of C18 objects] gives us a useful model for understanding the dialectical relationship between our present and our past.”

Finally, as to the question of institutional frameworks and new modalities:  what are the best ways to produce future collaborations, not only across V21 and eighteenth-century studies, but broadly across various fields and emergent collectives?  Borders between eighteenth-century scholars, Romanticists, and Victorianists grow ever blurrier, and we are not the only V21 affiliates whose work fits in more with ASECS than NAVSA.  Is the time ripe for a friendly takeover, a broadening of the tent?  Are V21’s intellectual goals bigger than Victorianism—are they, in fact, a clarion call for literary studies as a whole?  Or do those of us working in the eighteenth century need, instead, to start our own collective, and encourage cross-overs?  Discussion in the panel’s Q&A suggested that such an organization would have as one of its objectives a commitment to antiracist and anticolonial work in our field, joining the work of groups such as Bigger6 in Romantic studies, ShakeRace in early modern studies, and the Medievalists of Color.  (Since the recent ASECS meeting, we have added the BIPOC18 collective to this list).  While V21 is clearly engaged in such work—as Anna Kornbluh pointed out, V21 is motivated by the postcolonial call to break down the national and historical frameworks through which literary studies have reproduced imperialism—this goal is not explicitly part of the manifesto.  Should it be?  Or, rather than perpetually revise our mission statements, should we focus on making collectives and building coalitions, respecting each organization’s way of approaching the big picture?

One thing that the V21 Collective has done beautifully is actively to integrate graduate student, non-tenure-track, and early career researchers in ways that allow them to feel (correctly!) that it is their platform as much as anyone else’s.  It has served as a model for other collectives in this regard.  We believe that, in our shared but inequitable present, providing a “home” for institutionally disenfranchised peers, and practicing non-hierarchical methods of interaction, is one of the primary reasons we need new platforms, genres, and scholar-activist communities in our fields right now.  Whether or not we organize a “V21 for the C18,” how might we best provide space for active collaboration across not only periods but also differentials of institutional power?  One thing we have observed as C18-based affiliates of V21 is that traditional periodizations are, in fact, not a separate issue from the question of how institutions organize power.  Building new coalitions in defiance of hierarchy necessitates transhistorical and cross-field thinking.  We certainly long for academic frameworks and infrastructures that would put us in touch not only with Victorianists, or Modernists, but also Early Modernists and Medievalists, of all ranks.  It seems vital that we routinely remind each other that one period’s “emergent objects” can be another’s foregone conclusion, and to take stock of the way our different knowledges appear from each others’ perspectives.  Let’s not lose sight of the fact that one of the reasons we, as eighteenth-centuryists, ended up in V21’s orbit is because its work is so exciting!  In a present that is so bleak in so many ways, we all need the gravitational pull of concerted collective effort to stay in motion.  We feel the possibilities of broader collaboration, and of circulating knowledges along new paths, as an influx of energy.  How might we reciprocate and carry this energy forward by making eighteenth-century studies a vitalizing resource beyond the period, the discipline, the academy?

For the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference program, Katarzyna Bartoszynska and Eugenia Zuroski chaired a roundtable responding to the V21 Collective’s intervention in nineteenth-century studies and the possibilities it presented for reflecting on current problems and critical approaches in eighteenth-century studies.  Additional contributions to the roundtable can be found here.