Kate Singer

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Kate Singer's article examines the utility of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML markup protocols as a method for analyzing and describing poetic texts, focusing on her experience teaching TEI encoding to an undergraduate senior seminar. Singer presents text encoding not merely as a means to producing an end result, such as a digital edition, but as "a dynamic, hands-on method for self-conscious, unhurried reading" that encourages debates about critical interpretation. Her essay discusses her pedagogical approach, specific assignments, and student papers written after completing the encoding unit. As Singer suggests, teaching methods like TEI encoding can serve two purposes: equipping students with practical, project-based skills and exposing the interpretive choices that are at the heart of textual editing and text encoding.

Mary Robinson's now infamous depiction of Sappho's leap into the Leucadian deep at the end of her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon has been most often read as the poet's celebration or critique of the poetics of sensibility. Understanding this and other moments from her work as arising from the discourse of suicide reveals Robinson working not simply with or against feeling but rather thinking through epistemology more broadly. Beginning with her earliest poems, Robinson repeatedly depicts moments of oblivion that evacuate the ecstasy of sensation and sensibility, or feeling built on empiricist sensation. Sappho, after she becomes stuck singing the same songs of sickly feeling about Phaon, plots her final leap as an exit from an empiricist idiocy – the constant sensing, emoting, and embodying required of the feeling female poet schooled in empiricist epistemology. Placing herself in conversation with friends and philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Robinson skirts both contemporary notions of sentimental and rational suicide. Drawing instead on John Locke's discussion of liberty as the choice to think and forbear to think, exemplified in both Locke and Robinson by cliff leaping, Robinson theorizes suicide as a perverse kind of freedom. Sappho's self-destruction in the oceanic void figures a radical turn past Enlightenment forms of knowing – particularly those dependent on sensation and passion – to a new epistemological horizon.

THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS OF SHELLEY SCHOLARSHIP HAVE BEEN OCCUPIED with bringing the idealist Shelley down to earth. New historicism has patiently uncovered a historical world off which the poet fed, connecting personal acts of consumption with social and political praxis. (1) In particular, Timothy Morton's Shelley and the Revolution in Taste reveals how Shelley's revolutionary project, especially his vegetarianism, aimed at rejuvenating the body and the land, and Nora Crook and Derek Guiton's study of Shelley's obsession with medicine depicts how the poet's efforts to preserve his own body translated into a passionate concern for the health of society. If food and medicine both represent means of promoting health and vitality, for Shelley, drugs seem to form a special category of substances which do not simply push the limits of the body but offer the possibility of transcending it altogether, if only for discrete moments. They also present a strange kind of nutrition in edibles that make the body sick, and threaten its vitality in hopes of a monumental convalescence. Unlike Coleridge and De Quincey who consumed laudanum for its own sake, drugs for Shelley are serious business. They do not merely open doors of perception, and the liberation they offer is not recreational or solely artistic. One wouldn't catch Shelley philosophizing from his armchair on opium--or even writing on it. Instead, drugs appear in Shelley's poems at very specific moments as mechanisms of a precise political, revolutionary plan, aimed at interrogating and sometimes erasing the kinds of habituations and addictions the body often demands. Earl Wasserman might remind us that for Shelley the very distinction between the subject and its object is in fact a mental solipsism that the poet aims to reveal and move beyond. (2) Shelley internalized a tremendous number of discourses at once through his expansive reading, and his output reveals a syncretic poet attempting to move beyond the fragmentation of language and those specialized discourses that reify difference, hierarchy and ideology through the kind of synthesizing and reflective experience that drugs can produce. In Prometheus Unbound and "The Triumph of Life," major cruxes of both poems might be described as psychedelic experiences. Asia, in Act II of Shelley's lyric drama, inhales "oracular vapors" at the pinnacle of the mountains, which sends her on a trip to the cave of Demogorgon, ultimately to be swept away by the Spirit of the Hour's chariot, but not before she expectorates a genetic history of gods and humans that explains how she got there in the first place. In Shelley's last, unfinished poem, the wayward Rousseau drinks nepenthe offered by the "shape all light" in the hopes of discovering how he found himself in the "valley of perpetual dream" (397). In both cases, Asian women are implicated in the drug experience. Asia ingests the revolutionary gases and then emits liquid fight that intoxicates all those who come into contact with her, and the "shape all light," auroral light from the East, purveys the cup of laudanum-like nepenthe that provides Rousseau with his vision. Asia and Rousseau both internalize drugs in order to externalize something already within themselves--a representation of socio-political structures--precisely so the imagination can move beyond the kinds of hierarchical relationships that accompany patriarchal, colonial discourse. For Shelley, drugs act like an emetic, forcing their users to regurgitate the poisonous status quo they have swallowed, insisting they contemplate social and linguistic change from the self-critical vacancy of an empty stomach. Moreover, we might reread the "shape all light" not as a nauseating, evil seductress who entices Rousseau once again to fall prey to his bodily desires, but instead as a figure who provides him with the only possible way out of the nightmare of history, with a vision of history that contains its own critique. Rousseau's hallucination goes so far as to reflect the very structure of habituation--the patriarchal libidinous energies that narrate and produce history--that prevents social change instigated by a creative act of the imagination. …

Even as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man revolves around a contagious plague, it studies a parallel phenomenon, trans-corporeal affects that transform bodies, things, and our very notions of materiality. While readers may be more familiar with the diseased feelings of Evadne and Raymond, this paper dwells on the loving kinds of transmogrifying affects that act as forces and as labile materialities. Queer intimacies that transfer between Adrian and Lionel not only alter ontologies (Lionel’s becoming man from animal and back again), but they also rearrange human and animal relations into queer assemblages of people, animals, plants, and noncorporeal entities. Such posthuman affect evinces Shelley’s last, best hope for human strategies of feeling our way through the Anthropocene in order to change the very natures and embodiments of humans.