LESSONS OF ACADEMIC ENGLISH University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus 28-29 September 2023 Thursday 28 September Venue: Alan Gilbert 121 Join from PC, Mac, iOS or Android: https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/81731831166?pwd=UHR4UVNMVTdYbFVFUkt0VC95bERXd z09 Password: 421956 10am: Conference Opening 10:30am-12pm Chair: Simon During Ronan McDonald, Freeing Attention: Focus and Mind Wandering in Literary Studies James Ley, Adversarial or Therapeutic? Reflections on some recent attitudes and approaches to literature and literary criticism LUNCH 1-2:30pm Chair: Ronan McDonald Keynote: Helen Thaventhiran, Firstness, Fans, Force 3-4:30pm Chair: Justin Clemens Michelle Menzies, Confronting Images: Literature and Mediation Joe Hughes, One Paragraph in Williams 5:00-6.30pm Chair: Christian Gelder Diana Barnes, Centring the Mother: Experience and Literary Value Nicholas Heron, Auerbach’s Present: Philology, World Literature and the Crisis of the Modern Humanities 7:30pm Dinner - Jimmy Watson’s Friday 29 September Venue: Old Metallurgy 103 Zoom meeting on Join from PC, Mac, iOS or Android: https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/85424384295?pwd=WjZLRmZUVFFjMUIxMlA4WEtQWVIxU T09 Password: 199047 9-10:30am Chair: Jonathan McCoy Lisa O’Connell, Hau Kiou Choaan, Ian Watt and the Rise of the Novel Mark Taylor, The Idealist Austen (via Zoom) 11am-12:30pm Chair: Helen Thaventhiran Keynote: Simon During, The T.S. Eliot Problem 1:30-3pm Chair: Michelle Menzies Christian Gelder, What Richards Did After Practical Criticism: Science, Meaning, Instruments Jonathan McCoy, René Wellek's structuralism 3:30-4.30pm Chair: Lisa O’Connell Justin Clemens, Sarah Fantini, Everything in Moderation; or, Our Life in the Bush of Ghosts 5:00-6.30pm Chair: Paul Giles Thomas Karshan, In Defense of Imitation: A Return to the New Humanism (via Zoom) Joseph Williams, How critical is Creative Writing? Malcolm Bradbury, UEA, and the ‘serious’ writer (via Zoom) 8:00pm Dinner – TBA ABSTRACTS AND BIOS Keynotes: Simon During (simon.during@gmail.com) Title: The T.S. Eliot Problem Abstract: T.S. Eliot was the mid-twentieth century’s most recognized and authoritative Anglophone literary figure, not just because he was a major poet but because he was also understood to have established modern academic criticism. These days, for many reasons, Eliot is more often ignored or critiqued than celebrated. So there exists a T.S. Eliot problem. This paper address two facets of this problem: 1) in the wake of Joseph North’s recent book denigrating Eliot in favour of I.A. Richards, it examines the question of who did what in establishing the modern discipline; 2) it analyses the relation between Eliot’s literary criticism and his later conservative social/cultural criticism, which helped lower his reputation. Bio: Simon During is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is currently writing a book with Amanda Anderson entitled Humanities Theory. It should appear late next year. Helen Thaventhiran (hlc40@cam.ac.uk) Title: Firstness, Fans, Force Abstract: Sidney’s Defence of Poetry listed the products of the poet’s invention as: ‘heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like’. The critical imagination invents differently. Instead of chimeras and furies it generates terms, categories, conceptual clusters, technical steps, thought experiments, metaphors and such like. The polemical turn in recent readings of the history of literary criticism makes little space for the generative but volatile force of the critical imagination, for all that this is what has led to some of the most plural, pliant possibilities of difficult thought about words in words. This lecture considers two of the twentieth-century’s most imaginative figures of critical thought or radical language research, who conducted experiments that tried to imagine a place for experience, and the experience of the meaning of words, within future systems of verbal analysis. First, I first consider the ‘Significs’ of Victoria Welby, the little-studied scholar of words and meanings whose correspondence with the American pragmatist, C.S. Peirce, featured in The Meaning of Meaning (1923). The lecture’s second half introduces a pioneering figure in machine translation, Margaret Masterman, who drew on her studies with Wittgenstein and immersion in the world of Cambridge close reading, to re-imagine verbal analysis. Masterman’s concern was, in her words, ‘all the semantically shifting layered and interlacing depths of language – all the most Coleridge-like features of this frightening and volatile phenomenon of human talk, the very foundation of thinking’—more specifically, with how the computer can disclose these depths to us. I explore their work to ask this question: how, within language research—even when philosophical or digital—can we continue to imagine critical practice as a mode of knowledge involving experiential categories for the meaning of words? Bio: Helen Thaventhiran is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge. Her research concerns close reading practices, intellectual history and the philosophy of language. Publications include: Radical Empiricists: Five Modernist Close Readers (OUP, 2015) and William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words and Related Writings (OUP, 2020) as well as book chapters, articles and reviews about Susanne Langer, Wittgenstein, Eliot and Empson. She is currently completing a book titled Micrologies: writing in the margins of philosophy. General Papers: Diana G. Barnes (Diana.Barnes@une.edu.au) Title: Centring the Mother: Experience and Literary Value Abstract: This paper concerns the fate of a marginal poem written on the flyleaf of the Huntington Library’s copy of Lachrymae Musarum (1649) a collection of English civil war elegies which included early works by Andrew Marvell and John Dryden. The volume was dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased Henry, Lord Hastings, and the marginal poem was signed “L.H.” for his mother, Lucy Hastings. Owing to the early twentieth-century archival preference for “clean” copies the marginal poem was detached from the volume and stored separately, until H.T. Swedenberg took an interest and published his transcription in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 1952. At the time Swedenberg was working on his critical magnum opus, the University of California multivolume edition of Dryden, and as a historicist bibliographer he took an interest in contextual fragments such as L.H.’s poem. His critical modus operandi was sharpened by his opposition to the new criticism of Cleanth Brooks and co, and he made a bid for the value of the poem not on the grounds of intrinsic literary value but as a document of experience. My paper will consider how the legacy of this critical debate shaped the reception of early modern women’s writing, and suggest an alternative way forward enabled by the idea of the Derridean dangerous supplement. Bio: Diana G. Barnes is a Senior Lecturer in English Literary Studies at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. Her field of research is early modern literature with a particular interest in gender and intellectual history. Her book Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664 was published with Ashgate in 2013. Currently she is completing a contracted book on bubbles in early modern discourse, and midway in an ARC Discovery Project on early modern women’s engagement with stoicism. Justin Clemens (jclemens@unimelb.edu.au) Sarah Fantini Adele Marum Panel Title: Everything in Moderation; or, Our Life in the Bush of Ghosts Abstract: In a recent sequence of marking meetings for an undergraduate subject at the University of Melbourne, we met to moderate our evaluation of student essays to ensure parity across the cohort: the good, the bad, and the ugly. In a context of external managerial domination of the terms of engagement — for instance, symptomatic returns of the bell curve as a professedly less-than-ideal model of mark distribution — we found the essays we were discussing raised difficult practical issues not only regarding the relation of quantification and qualification, but also regarding form and content, style and argument, quotation and paraphrase, aims and ends, the operations and uses of literature, and so on and on. In the context, then, of a confidential meeting whose only attestable public outcomes are those of a numerical/letter grade, a radically inconsistent immixture of literary-critical spectres — Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, Brooks, Tate and others — returned, at once unbidden yet absolute. This 1.5 hour panel will consist of three 20 minute papers by the participants on the practical and historical complexities attending this situation. Bios: Justin Clemens is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is Barron Field in NSW (Melbourne UP 2023), co-written with Thomas H. Ford. Sarah Fantini is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis considers what an ecocritical orientation can bring to close readings of poetry by Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Christian Gelder (christian.gelder@mq.edu.au) Title: What Richards Did After Practical Criticism: Science, Meaning, Instruments Abstract: This paper examines the relations between science, meaning and the concept of the ‘instrument’ in I. A. Richards’s work from the 1920s to the 1950s. It traces, firstly, the shifting historical conceptions of ‘science’ that run throughout Richards’s career, from the quantitative studies of poetry produced at the turn-of-the-century to the neurology of the 1920s to his interest in cybernetics in the 1950s. Secondly, it identifies the concept of the linguistic ‘instrument’ as central to his early and late career, noting how it signifies the evolution of his political epistemology. Lastly, by historicising Richards in relation to these three moments (quantity, neurology, and scientific linguistics), it offers some reflections on how we can better remember Richards—and how remembering him properly might help us to forget him. Bio: Christian Gelder is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney working on the relationship between modern literature and psychoanalytic psychiatry in twentieth-century America. He completed his PhD at Cambridge in 2022, which he is currently revising as a monograph entitled Poetic Explanations: Modern Poetry and its Scientific Study. Nicholas Heron (njheron@gmail.com) Title: Auerbach’s Present: Philology, World Literature and the Crisis of the Modern Humanities Abstract: Thanks largely to the influence of Edward Said, Erich Auerbach’s 1952 essay on world literature has become canonical for the contemporary disciplinary field organized under that name. But the context in which Auerbach wrote his essay was very different to that in which Said (and others) have received it and demands reconstruction on its own terms. In the interwar years, the literary scholar Fritz Strich had recommended Goethe’s concept of world literature as a tool of international cooperation. From the very first sentence of his essay, composed for a Festschrift in Strich’s honour, Auerbach contested this reading. The contemporary world situation was no longer Goethe’s, he maintained; under present conditions, world literature named the literary-epistemological condition corresponding to an incipient political monism. For Auerbach, the advent of world literature marked the end of the humanistic paradigm founded on the Romantic concept of the Volksgeist that had prevailed since the end of the eighteenth century. Rather than oppose this tendency via an appeal to the actuality of national literatures, this paper argues that in his writings from this period Auerbach sought to recover an alternative paradigm better suited to meet the demands of the new dispensation. While often conflated with its Romantic counterpart, Giambattista Vico’s historical epistemology, with its emphasis on the “common sense” spontaneously adopted by individual nations independently of one another, offered just such a model. Bio: Nicholas Heron teaches the history of political thought at the University of Queensland. Joe Hughes (joseph.hughes@unimelb.edu.au) Title: One Paragraph in Williams Abstract: In this paper I want to take up Joseph North’s call to develop a “materialist aesthetics” developed through a reckoning with Raymond Williams’ late work. In “Two Paragraphs in Raymond Williams,” North advocates for a return to Williams’ expressionism. Artworks on this model draw their energy from the way they metabolise “experience;” the task of the critic is to make explicit the different folds of a collective experience animating the work, but in a way that develops aesthetic categories adequate to the standpoint of the proletariat and thus to a different experience than the one expressed through bourgeois aesthetic categories. I want to reflect here on a third paragraph in Williams that poses a sequence of difficulties for this view. In Politics and Letters, Williams’s interlocutors pose a question about those conditions of experience that never enter into experience as such but which “any systematic discourse on history or society” must grasp if it aims at “scientific knowledge.” Williams seems to admit the force of the question, but then immediately moves on (as the interview form requires), not quite addressing the way the question, in shifting the terrain from a historical materialism to a dialectical materialism, poses radical problems to the entire expressionist paradigm. In this paper, I first work through the structure of the problem and then imagine a sequence of different responses one might make, each redistributing the relation between Theory and art in a different way. Thomas Karshan (T.Karshan@uea.ac.uk) Title: In Defense of Imitation: A Return to the New Humanism Abstract: It is often forgotten that when creative writing began at the University of Iowa in 1936, it did not aim only, or even above all, to produce new writers. Among its founders was Norman Foerster. Foerster was one of the ‘New Humanists’, inspired, among others, by Babbitt at Harvard, whose aim was to revive the Renaissance pedagogical programme of Erasmus, Petrarch, Poliziano. At the heart of that programme was the principle of imitatio which in modern terms may be considered at once creative and critical. As Foerster wrote in ‘The Study of Letters’ (1941), ‘one of the best ways of understanding imaginative literature is to write it, since the act of writing – the selection of materials, the shaping of them, the recasting and revising – enables the student to repeat what the makers of literature have done, to see the processes and the problems of authorship from the inside.’ For many modernists such as Pound, Auden, and Woolf, imitation was a key part of critical practice, and these ideas also carry over into the thinking of New Critics such as Blackmur. Imitative pedagogy also helps promote creative writing which benefits from a thoughtful analytic engagement with past and foreign literature. Although often used in the teaching of poetry writing, imitation is less often practised in teaching creative writing: prose, and its value for teaching the understanding of literature is still less realised. I am one of several contemporary academics seeking to reintroduce imitation as a central pedagogical principle which insists on the inseparability of creation and criticism, having had great success with it in my MA teaching at the University of East Anglia, where students of creative writing and criticism sit alongside each other in my MA seminars on Ludic Literature. I have written about this on creativecritical.net, the website I run: here. This paper will begin by look back on Norman Foerster as writer, teacher, and institution builder, discussing the origins of his views on imitation in, especially, Erasmus, and the tacit imitative ideas in close reading and New Critical practice. I will then move on to discussing my own experiences of teaching through imitation and I will make a case for the value of imitation in both creative and critical pedagogy. Bio: Thomas Karshan is an associate professor at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches on a range of subjects in modernism and contemporary literature, including a creative-critical MA module on ludic literature, which involves students doing extensive work in imitating and parodying the styles of the authors studied - the subject of his talk today. This interest in parody comes out of his early work on Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, the subject of his first book with OUP in 2011. More recently he has been working on the history of the essay and recently published the co-edited On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, published with OUP in 2020.. He is currently working in particular on the relation between the creative and the critical, in writing, teaching, and theory, and working on a book on that subject for OUP, as well as editing the creativecritical.net website - for which he would welcome contributions.' James Ley (james.ley@theconversation.edu.au) Title: Adversarial or Theraputic? Reflections on some recent attitudes and approaches to literature and literary criticism Abstract: The paper will take as its starting point the apparent cultural shift from what Lionel Trilling, in the early 1960s, termed ‘adversary culture’ to what Frank Furedi, in the early 2000s, termed ‘therapy culture’, with a particular focus on the implications for conceptions of literature and literary criticism. It will consider some of the ways in which underlying critical assumptions about literature, and the general perception of its cultural standing and significance, have evolved in recent decades, resulting in a different set of political, ethical and institutional demands being made of literature. Finally, it will reflect on a recent ‘aesthetic turn’ in non-academic critical discourse as a reaction to some of those ethical demands. Bio: James Ley is Deputy Books and Ideas Editor at the Conversation and a Contributing Editor with the Sydney Review of Books. He is the author of The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (2014). Jonathan McCoy (jpmccoy@student.unimelb.edu.au) Title: René Wellek's structuralism Abstract: René Wellek’s association with the Prague Linguistic Circle is well-known, and Wellek frequently acknowledged Roman Jakobson’s influence on the development of the concept of literature that he would employ in his practice of comparative criticism. If Wellek also acknowledged the influence of the Circle’s concept of structure on his thought, the precise significance of this remains to be determined, not least in order to clarify what Wellek understood to be criticism’s “special problem of value”. In this paper I take up Wellek’s own concept of structure in order to consider its relationship to value in his treatments of both the history of criticism and history in criticism. I argue that this concept of structure is consequential for the recent history of academic literary criticism: before 1970, and after. Bio: Jonathan McCoy is pursuing a PhD at the University of Melbourne. Ronan McDonald (ronan.mcdonald@unimelb.edu.au) Title: Freeing Attention: Focus and Mind-Wandering in Literary Studies Abstract: A recent New Yorker piece by Nathan Heller, ‘The End of the English Major’ (Feb 27, 2023) generated a fair deal of hair-pulling and lamenting in our discipline. The article recounts an interview with James Shapiro, the eminent Shakespearean, who throws his iPhone on the table pointing it as evidence that the discipline is doomed. For Shapiro, we are all too caught up in the tantalising marketplace of streaming and podcasts, clicks and likes, for the devoted attention required to read deeply. But could this diagnosis not be inverted? Could we not say that the deliberate stealing of our focus that marks our digital age mandates a new purpose and raison d’etre for close reading? Modes of attention-giving, of critical vigilance and focus, has after all been central to English academic criticism since its foundation by I.A Richards and T.S. Eliot. This paper reads current developments in the discipline, specifically around post-critique and surface reading, in terms of the distraction economy, finding a genealogy for these concerns in earlier critical movements at the dawn of the discipline. Using the work of Jonathan Crary on attention, and some recent interventions by Lucy Alford, Alice Bennett, Amanda Anderson it seeks to unpick some of the metaphors used to understand attention – the spotlight, the filter, the commodity – to reflect on the braiding of attention and mind-wandering in the history of criticism. Bio: Ronan McDonald FAHA holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has research interests in Irish and Irish-Australian literature, the history of criticism and the value of the humanities and has published widely in these areas. He is Chief-Investigator, with Simon During on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on English: The History of a Discipline, 1920-70’. He is the series editor for Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture. Michelle Menzies (michelle.menzies@gmail.com) Title: Confronting Images: Literature and Mediation Abstract: As early as 1931 Walter Benjamin meditated that “the illiteracy of the future” is likely to be “ignorance not of reading and writing but of photography.’”1 This paper will propose that the shifting status of the ‘literary intellectual’ tracked by this conference is an adjunct to the rise of an intensely imagistic twentieth-century vernacular culture, and its consequent recalibration of the status of the literary arts per se. Both literary and media critics have hailed this development in Darwinian terms. Two decades ago Friedrich Kittler prognosticated that “the general digitization of channels and information” would trigger a reworking of subjectivity from the ground up; because in an era of audiovisual inscriptions, “one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies.”2 His claim finds an inverse echo in the late work of Fredrick Jameson, who greeted the rising omnipotence of a “whole new technology” as the vehicle for a “depthlessness, which finds its prolongation...in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum.”3 Key to the sense of elegy that pervades these fin de siècle diagnostics is the assumed passing away of a social subjectivity formed by the long era of what Marshall McLuhan dubbed the “Gutenberg Galaxy”—print media in general, and literature in particular.4 This paper will attempt to bracket both media triumphalism and literary nostalgia by revising the empiricist tone of Benjamin’s early efforts to evaluate an encroaching culture of visuality. I will turn here to Miriam Bratu Hansen—a key Anglophone interpreter of the Frankfurt School—and the mid- century poetry of Frank O’Hara to unpack the significance and value of the literary empiricist’s openness to experience in a world of pervasive mediation. Bio: Michelle Menzies s an independent scholar and curator of contemporary art. She holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from The University of Chicago. Research interests include literary theory, poetry, histories of film and photography, and philosophical aesthetics. Major curatorial projects include Cinema & Painting at the Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand; and the exhibition/symposium Phenomenologies of Projection, Aesthetics of Transition: Anthony McCall 1970-79, 2001— at the University of Chicago, U.S.A. Michelle’s current book monograph is focused on Henri Bergson, visual media, and contemporary aesthetics. Lisa O’Connell (locnell@gmail.com) Title: Hau Kiou Choaan, Ian Watt and the Rise of the Novel Abstract: The Chinese realist novel, Hau Kiou Choaan or The Pleasing History, was published in English translation in 1761, the year of Samuel Richardson’s death. This was the first Chinese novel to be translated into a European language. But The Pleasing History, and the 'talent-beauty’ genre it belonged to, were more or less ignored in the West for over two centuries. This paper begins to examine why, until very recently, the Chinese novel form made so little impact on English literary history and criticism, culminating in Ian Watt’s now classical account of the ‘rise of the novel’ in 1957. It will call on Marina Mackay’s recent book on Watt’s experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war in World War II as a concrete context to think about this problem. Bio: Lisa O’Connell is Associate Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. She is the author of The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century and co-editor of Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century as well as recent journal special issues, ‘Spaces of Enlightenment’ (Eighteenth-Century Life), ‘Catalysts of Change: Colonial Transformations of AngloEuropean Literary Culture’ (Postcolonial Studies). She specializes in 18th-century British literature and currently works on the history and theory of the novel and its relation to early global literatures. Mark Taylor (ma.taylor.5@gmail.com) Title: The Idealist Austen Abstract: Among historians of literary criticism, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the novels of Jane Austen played a crucial role in the institutionalization of novel studies in the Anglo-American academy. As Claudia Johnson has shown, moreover, that institutionalizing process demanded that a bright line be drawn between two types of Austen readers: on one side, the new, “serious” critics of the novel (H.W. Garrod, D.W. Harding, F.R. Leavis); on the other, the “Janeites”—that privileged cohort of publishers, professors, and literati (Lord David Cecil, R.W. Chapman, A.C. Bradley) whose “militantly dotty enthusiasm” for “their divine Jane” dominated both Oxbridge literary education and the Royal Society of Literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While scholars like Johnson have examined in detail the professional, sexual, and class politics of this demarcation, as well as its methodological implications for novel studies, one of the most significant elements in its intellectual history has remained largely unexplored: namely, the importance of idealism—especially the British Idealism associated with (among others) Thomas Hill Green, Edward Caird, and Bernard Bosanquet— in the Janeite milieu. This paper aims to restore this missing context for the rise of “academic English” and the place of novel studies within it, showing how the development of both new techniques for reading and interpreting literature and new modes of literary intellectualism took place in a complex, negative relationship to the idealist account of the work of art. In particular, I argue that the Janeites’ neo-Hegelian theories of comedy and tragedy were a necessary condition for the consolidation of a “formalist” approach to Austen’s fiction (epitomized by the shift from character to plot as the focus of critical attention), and thus to the novel more broadly. Bio: Mark Taylor is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College, where he teaches classes in the English Department and the multidisciplinary Global Nineteenth-Century Studies program. He received his PhD in English from Stanford University in 2019 and is currently working on a book about British Idealism and Victorian literature. Joseph Williams (Joseph.L.Williams@uea.ac.uk) Title: How critical is Creative Writing? Malcolm Bradbury, UEA, and the ‘serious’ writer Abstract: The MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia was established by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson in 1970 as an explicitly creative-critical project closely allied to the procedures of close reading. Bradbury recounted in a 1992 article in the Times Literary Supplement that he and Wilson ‘saw a fundamental aim of our programme as being one of new relations between the “creative” and the “critical”, both in individuals and in university culture too.’ In part the institutionalisation of creative practice in the form of an MA in Creative Writing was a response to the developments of literary theory, in particular poststructuralism and Roland Barthes’s ‘death of the Author’, but despite this, and despite the arch treatment of poststructuralism in his fictional works – most overtly in The History Man (1975) and the academic parody Mensonge (1987) – Bradbury’s definition of the ‘serious’ writer emphasised an awareness of, and engagement with, the developments of literary theory and continental philosophy, and the MA Creative Writers were encouraged to take modules in literary theory alongside their counterparts on the critical MA. Looking at archived teaching notes, firstly from Bradbury’s 1989 module ‘Fiction and the Creative Process’ – which was offered to students from both MAs and designed to ‘move between a “creative” and a “critical” perspective’ – and secondly from Bradbury’s 1992 creative writing workshop, we see how Bradbury sought in his teaching to bring criticism and creation into closer proximity. Bio: Joseph Williams is a postgraduate researcher at the University of East Anglia, writing a thesis on the creative, critical, and educational work of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge, and the journal Critical Quarterly, founded by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson in 1958.