How literature becomes knowledge: A case study

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 76, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 215-245

  Valenza, Robin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 69249181524     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.0.0037     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, 2 vol. (London, 1791), 1:369.
2. Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady, by Samuel Richardson, ed. Angus Ross (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).
3. Hereafter abbreviated C and cited parenthetically by page number. Leah Price's The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) analyzes the many different kinds of anthologies and abridgements of Clarissa in the eighteenth century. Richardson himself worried over the bulk of the text as he prepared the first edition, asking his friends to help him compress it and then not taking their advice. Sandra Macpherson's forthcoming book, Harm's Way, takes issue with this version of the Richardsonian plot, arguing that the key event is not the rape of Clarissa but her murder.
4. "Reading for the plot" is, of course, Peter Brooks's term; he observes that "[f]rom sometime in the mid-eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, Western societies seem to have felt an extraordinary need or desire for plots, whether in fiction, history, philosophy, or any of the social sciences" (Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984], 5).
5. Both Price and Ann Jessie Van Sant have shown how the desire for narrative and the belief in the moral instruction of sentiment are different but complementary. see Price; and Van Sant, "Afterword: A Dictionary of Morality: Reading for the Sentiment," to Richardson, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, vol.3 in Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on Clarissa 1747-1765, ed. Thomas Keymer and O. M. Brack (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 415-16, 430.
6. For discussions of the "when" question, see Jonathan Brody Kramnick, "The Aesthetics of Revisionism, a Response," Eighteenth-Century Life 21.3 (1997): 82-85,
7. and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
8. Trevor Ross argues for an earlier date, although he also finds the Johnsonian moment to be when t e canon began to look as it does now in "The Emergence of 'Literature': Making and Reading the english Canon in the Eighteenth Century," ELH 63 (1996): 397-422,
9. and The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1998).
10. Timothy Reiss argues that the institution of "literature" as a category that denotes imaginative writing was a late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century response to emerging political and social disjunctions. See Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992).
11. Terry Eagleton, Alvin Kernan, and James Engell have each asserted that "literature" meaning "imaginative writing" appears as a category in the eighteenth century; whether or not there was an older term (such as "poetry") that held the same meaning is an unsettled question. See Kernan, "The Idea of Literature," New Literary History 5 (1973): 31-40;
12. Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989);
13. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, anniversary edition (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. 15-20.
14. In revisiting many of the above works, Richard Terry urges that the process of canon-formation and the evolution of the term "literature" as meaning imaginative writing are not the same thing; the latter is hard to date (as proven, he suggests, by the occasional weaknesses of Raymond Williams's and René Wellek's otherwise spectacular respective forays into historical linguistics), whereas the former (the process of canon formation) clearly begins before the eighteenth century. See Terry, "The Eighteenth-Century Invention of English Literature: A Truism Revisited," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1996): 47-62,
15. and "Literature, Aesthetics, and anonicity in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Life 21.1 (1997): 80-101;
16. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985);
17. and Wellek, "What is Literature?" in What is Literature?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978), 16-23.
18. Elsewhere Kernan proposes another solution altogether: the adoption of the term "letters" to refer to the "full social existence of the literary world" in the eighteenth century, so as not to confuse it with the function of the modern term "literature," since Johnson's uses of the terms were more or less interchangeable and more or less general (Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987], 7-8, 258).
19. Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4, 31 March 1750.
20. Johnson to Richardson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vol. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 1:47-48.
21. see also Johnson, Letters, 1:75.
22. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio pursue this line of thought, explaining how the idea of an index was closely tied to the idea of how a book might be used: "a book's value was in part defined by its ability to make knowledge accessible and usable" (Book Use, Book Theory [Chicago: Joseph Regenstein Library, Univ. of Chicago, 2005], 12).
23. To choose an example from the second edition at random (that is, by what one might call the sortes Clarissae method - letting the book fall open as it may and one's finger fall where it will on the page): "[v.1.L22-23] From the same [Clarissa]. Is desirous to know the opinion Lord M's family have of her. Substance of a Letter from Lovelace, resenting the indignities e receives from her Relations. She freely acquaints him with her motives for corresponding with him; and that he had nothing to expect from her contrary to her duty. Insists that his next Letter shall be his last" (Richardson, Clarissa, 2nd ed. [London, 1749], vii). Later editions have moved this table of contents to the back of each volume.
24. Richardson, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, 87, 88.
25. Jocelyn Harris, introduction to Sir Charles Grandison, by Richardson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), xxxvii.
26. Introductory note to Rambler 97, 19 February 1751, 1.
27. Allen Walker Read notes that Charlotte Lennox, a friend of Johnson's, seems to have been the only living fiction writer other than Richardson to be included in Johnson's Dictionary. Her novel, The Female Quixote, is cited under "suppose," "talent," and "wildly." See Read, "The Contemporary Quotations in Johnson's Dictionary," ELH 2 (1935): 247. Read's sources include a nineteenth-century association copy of the dictionary in which all of the "moderns" that Johnson quotes have been listed by the owner, Edmund Malone, an Irish Shakespearean scholar who was also the subject of a (brief) biography by Boswell.
28. Johnson does not even use the whole 68-page table; his quotations only come from the first eighteen pages. William Keast speculates that perhaps Richardson had sent him this particular gathering of pages in "The Two Clarissas in Johnson's Dictionary," Studies in Philology 54 (1957): 429-39.
29. Robert DeMaria uses evidence from Johnson's library to suggest that Johnson's own reading habits were inconsistent - his reading seems to have been characterized by some combination of studiousness and curiosity, which led to his flipping through books as much as reading them. In any case, DeMaria notes, he may not have had preexisting notes to fall back on when writing the Dictionary, although his memory was itself an impressive catalog. See De Maria, Samuel Johnson and he Life of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), 41.
30. Jack Lynch has pointed out that if we trace Johnson's citations from John Hughes's 1715 edition of the Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, we might notice a similar pattern about "the way Johnson worked" (The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002], 139). The dictionary's quotations from the Faerie Queene are clustered almost entirely towards the beginning of the work, and many of them may be accessed by using Hughes's thorough glossary of the work.
31. I have lately found myself anticipated in the discovery of Johnson's borrowings from the index by a 1957 article by Keast. Finding it sooner would certainly have saved me some readings of the Dictionary; he and I have come up with the same empirical results. Keast's study is mainly a comment on Johnson's Dictionary; it is less interested in what one might do with this information in reading Clarissa. See Keast, "The Two Clarissas in Johnson's Dictionary," Studies in Philology 54 (1957): 429-439.
32. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum, in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. William Warburton, 9 vol. (London, 1751), 5:111.
33. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 4 vol. (London, 1751), 2:63.
34. Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, The Cry (London, 1754), 183. Fielding and Collier make a similar point about those who "strut in a borrow'd phrase from the ancients," which is "often no more than a sentence recollected out of the Latin syntaxis," only memorized piecemeal and certainly not understood (145).
35. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper (New York: Norton, 1973), 337-38.
36. Swift's comment about the fish's tail introduces an extended conceit about accessing posteriors through back-door entrances; this analogy is not pursued in Pope's poem. Roger D. Lund also remarks on Swift's use of the metaphor, although, like Pope, he politely avoids discussing anal penetration. See Lund, "The Eel of Science; Index-learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture," Eighteenth-Century Life 22.2 (1998): 18-42.
37. Aristotle, Topics, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, vol.1 in Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908-1952), 101a, 105b.
38. Aristotle continues in this vein: "In the margin, too, one should indicate also the opinions of individual thinkers, e.g. 'Empedocles said that the elements of bodies were four': for any one might assent to the saying of some generally accepted authority" (105b). The drawbacks of this method are alluded to in A Tale of a Tub: an author can write "tho' his Head be empty, provided his Commonplace-Book be full" (339). According to Swift, a lack of originality, which often takes the form of plagiarism, is the constant temptation afforded by this method. On commonplace methods, see Susan Miller, Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), esp. 22;
39. Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996);
40. Ann Blair, "Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book," Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541-51;
41. Paul Dyck, "Reading and Writing the Commonplace: Literary Culture Then and Now," (Re) Soundings 1.1 (1996), http:// marauder.millersville. edu/resound/vol1iss1/cpb/cpblayot.html (accessed 26 november 2008);
42. John Guillory, "The English Common Place: Lineages of the Topographical Genre," Critical Quarterly 33.4 (1991): 3-27;
43. Sister Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York: Pageant, 1962);
44. Ann Moss, "The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace-Book," Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 421-36;
45. and Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), esp. 130-133
46. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
47. A. D. Horgan points out the tightened connection between logic and language in the Ramean pursuit of method, which, over the long term, increased the emphasis on linguistic precision rather than ornamentation in representations of knowledge. See Johnson on Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 148.
48. The Ramean method, named for the sixteenth-century French humanist Petrus Ramus, proceeds by means of simplified Aristotelian logic that poses a series of either/or decisions. The result is a tree diagram that branches into two parts each time a decision is made. The eighteenth century's penchant for prefacing encyclopedias with diagrams of the system of knowledge derives from the Ramean method. Robert Darnton discusses the almost compulsive manner in which Enlightenment authors classified knowledge to make it useful and to keep it in its place. See "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie," in The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Vintage, 1985), 145-214.
49. See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 42. Ong emphasizes that Ramus's method was distinguished by its emphasis on use.
50. Johnson, "Preface," in Johnson on the English Language, vol.18, The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Gwin Kolb and Robert deMaria (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), 74.
51. "[A]lphabetization, a principal of indexical arrangement, became the norm" over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Cormack and Mazzio, 14). In his "Preface" to Richard Rolt's Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London, 1756), Johnson himself notes: "It has lately been the practice of the learned to range knowledge by the alphabet, and publish dictionaries of every kind of literature. This practice has perhaps been carried too far by force of fashion. Sciences, in themselves systematical and coherent, are not very properly broken into such fortuitous distributions" (1). But while he suggests that an alphabetical order can be disruptive to categories, Johnson concedes that the use value of a dictionary is impossible to conceive without alphabetical order in certain cases, presumably including his own dictionary.
52. The Dictionary has 114,000 to 116,000 quotations, depending on how one counts and which edition is used. See Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Norton, 1971), 199;
53. and David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 75.
54. See Thomas B. Gilmore, "Implicit Criticism of Thomson's Seasons in Johnson's Dictionary," Modern Philology 86 (1989): 265-273
55. Johnson, "Preface," 110. The dictionary's aim to restrict and foreclose linguistic options is writ large across Johnson's preface to the dictionary and the dictionary itself
56. Throughout the Dictionary, definitions use explanations less clear than the words they purport to define. "A famous example is cough (noun), 'A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp seriosity'" (Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (London, 1755),
57. Stephen Orgel discusses the early modern concept of " compendiousness" in his afterword to Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 286.
58. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 3rd ed. (London, 1704), 143.
59. A promising example is Brad Pasanek's innovative project "The Mind is a Metaphor: A Database of Eighteenth-Century Metaphors of Mind," http://mind.textdriven.com/ db/browse.php (accessed 26 november 2008), although it may risk some of the same statistical anomalies as the databases on which it is based.
60. See Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, http://galenet.galegroup.com. proxy. uchicago.edu/servlet/ECCO (accessed 26 november 2008). Most of the remainder turn out to be false leads, artifacts of the searching method rather than legitimate occurrences of the term. The others appear to be genuine uses of the term that follow from Pope's coinage, although they do not necessarily cite him.
61. Henry Fielding, "A Fragment of a Comment on Lord Bolingbroke's Essays," in The Works of Henry Fielding, 2nd ed., 8 vol. (London, 1762), 504.
62. "Preface" to The Mathematician 1 (London, 1745), iv.
63. Carlo Ginzburg, "Conversations with Orion," trans. Giovanni Zanalda in Perspectives Online 43.5 (2005), http:/www.historians.org/ perspectives/issues/2005/0505/0505arc1. cfm (accessed 30 november 2008).
64. Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books (Dublin, 1744), 298.
65. Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 75-76.
66. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 420,
67. quoted in Dussinger, "Introduction" to A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, xi.
68. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947).
69. Some of the techniques that form part of what I am calling "slow reading" share a common impulse with Franco's Moretti's practice of "distant reading," which depends on collecting data from means other than New Critical methods. Distance from a text, Moretti suggests, may imply a reduction of certain kinds of information, but this reduction is also what allows other connections among elements, "shapes, relations, structures" and "patterns" to become visible ("Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History" New Left Review 26 [2004]: 94).
70. See also Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005),
71. and Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998).
72. Stanley Fish discusses how a reader response approach to literature has the effect of "slow[ing] down the reading experience so that 'events' one does not notice in normal time . . . are brought before our analytical attentions" ("Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," New Literary History, 2 [1970]: 128).
73. See Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003).
74. See, for example, Terry Castle's Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's Clarissa (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), esp. 38-46, which reviews other perspectives on this critical crossroads.
75. She includes in her analysis Judith Wilt's argument ("He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa," PMLA 92 [1977]: 19-32) that the history of interpreting Clarissa has been based on misinterpreting who rapes Clarissa.
76. Frances Ferguson's "Rape and the Rise of the Novel" (Representations 20 [1987]: 88-112) shows how adjudicating rape in the Anglo-American legal tradition hinges on the very kinds of interpretation at stake in Clarissa in particular the understanding of consent.
77. Sandra Macpherson's "Lovelace, Ltd." (ELH 65 [1998]: 99-121) also shows how Richardson and Clarissa became involved directly and indirectly with reinterpreting and revising the marriage law in eighteenth-century England.
78. And, of course, William Warner puts Clarissa's invitations to interpretation front-and-center in his very title, Reading "Clarissa": The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).
79. Nancy Armstrong ("Reclassifying Clarissa: Fictions and the Making of the Modern Middle Class" in Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for The Clarissa Project, ed. Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland [New York: AMS Press, 1999], 19-44) points out that the ambiguity of the novel is in part due to Clarissa's own over-literality in interpreting norms for female behavior, an interpretive strategy that Lovelace construes as deliberately deceptive;
80. and Flynn remarks that, for better or worse, the critical history of Clarissa is a history of demonstrating why it is a "divided" text ("Richardson and His Readers: An Introduction to the essays," in Clarissa and Her Readers, 3).
81. Johnson, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vol. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), 1:297.
82. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985);
83. and A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977).
84. Isobel Grundy defends Johnson on this score, arguing that the very purpose of the eighteenth-century essay was to work through the writer's potentially contradictory thoughts. See Grundy, "Samuel Johnson: Man of Maxims?" in Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, ed. Isobel Grundy (New York: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984), 13-30, esp. 17, 28.
85. Johnson, Dictionary, s.v., "fugitive. adj."
86. See Richardson, Clarissa, 370-383
87. Admittedly, "improprious" (OED: "Lacking a proper form of its own," origin unknown[!]) or the possible alternative "improprietary" lurk in obscurity in English and are only barely words, but I am at a loss for better, OED Online, s.v., "improprious, a.," http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50113514 (accessed 26 november 2008),
88. "improprietary." http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50113511 (accessed 26 november 2008).
89. See Read, 247. Read cites a 1928 University of Chicago master's thesis, Samuel Johnson's Reading for the Dictionary, by Eula Stark, on the same point.
90. Lovelace is not always so original. Margaret Doody observes that Lovelace's remarks sometimes mock eighteenth-century printed anatomies of compliments for ladies, but in using them, he comes, perhaps against his will, to endorse them. See Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 100.
91. Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957) argues that realistic naming is one of the central features of the eighteenth-century novel.
92. On eighteenth-century onomastics, see Julia Genster, "Belforded Over: The Reader in Clarissa," in Clarissa and Her Readers, 143-162, esp. 150;
93. Allen Reddick, "Teaching the Dictionary," in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. David R. Anderson and Gwin J. Kolb (New York: MLA, 1993), 84-91, esp. 90.
94. On the economic dimensions of eighteenth-century constructions of sympathy, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).
95. See DeMaria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), 45.
96. See also Isobel Grundy, "Seduction Pursued by Other Means: The Rape in Clarissa," in Clarissa and Her Readers, 255-267
97. William Blake, "Annotations to Boyd's Historical Notes on Dante, Dublin 1785," in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1982), 633.
98. Andrew Abbott, "Heavy Connections," The University of Chicago Magazine 99.1 (2006), http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0610/features/reg.shtml#heavy (accessed 12 February 2007).
99. Richardson, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Letitia Barbauld, 6 vol. (London, 1804), 2:229, 6:78, 4:120.