Projects

My dream is becoming true: I am starting a PhD assistantship in September!!!

The title of my PhD project is “The Poetics and Politics of Environmental Attunement in Transatlantic Romanticisms (1800 – 1860).”

Here’s the gist of the project:

In his Guide (1835) to the English Lake District, William Wordsworth declares his wish

to preserve the native beauty of this delightful district, because still further changes in its appearance must inevitably follow, from the change of inhabitants and owners which is rapidly taking place . . . In this wish the author will be joined by persons of pure taste throughout the whole island, who, by their visits (often repeated) to the Lakes in the North of England, testify that they deem the district a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy. (Wordsworth 66-68)

Some twenty years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, near Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau laments in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) that the environment surrounding Walden Pond has changed, but, thankfully, not the pond itself:

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle . . . But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water . . . of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. (Thoreau 185-186)

In both excerpts from their respective works, Wordsworth and Thoreau express a similar sentiment: the wish to preserve the pristine beauty of their beloved environment and the implicit promotion of a prescribed way of looking at the place that they inhabit. These similitudes between seemingly geographically and temporally distant texts is, of course, no coincidence in the context of nineteenth-century transatlantic Romanticism. In fact, as Samantha C. Harvey, Fiona Robertson, and many other critics have demonstrated, “[t]here is a mutually formative but exceptionally intricate relationship between what is now called British Romanticism and the new political, social, and literary culture taking shape in the United States during the decades following the ratification of its constitution in 1787,” as “[i]deas, and books, moved back and forth across the Anglophone Atlantic,” and “[t]ransatlantic reception became a crucial element in the dissemination of Romantic poetry and prose” (Robertson 725). Some of the main Romantic ideas that moved back and forth and participated in the development of American Transcendentalism from the 1820s included: a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, emphasis on individual subjectivity and imagination, the emphasis on social reform to build a more just society, skepticism regarding conformity, the tension between political action and aesthetic contemplation (Coviello n. pag), and, of course, their engagement with what Harvey has called the Romantic triad, which “posits a dynamic interrelation between the categories of the human, divine, and natural (18) in their nature writing.

In this project, my focus would lie specifically in the type of attention, attunement, or awareness that transatlantic Romantic writers display in their environmentally-aware texts. Some of the key questions that would drive my work are: what kind of poetics of attention did Romantic and Transcendentalist authors craft as a response to the concerns generated by their temporal, spatial, climatic, cultural, and political environment in their writings? And might there be a common spirit—or climate—of the age on both Anglophone sides of the Atlantic? To attempt to answer these questions, this PhD thesis project aims to explore the poetics of attention, the phenomenology of the experience of time, space, and climate, and the development of sensory epistemologies in states of physical and psychological suspension (e.g. idleness, indolence, contemplation, mindfulness, Keatsian Negative Capability) as tools to alleviate and artistically—and perhaps politically—channel negative or ambivalent psychological conditions (e.g., anxiety, melancholy, isolation, nostalgia, longing, delusion) in order to reach psychological discordia concors, roughly from 1800 to 1860, in transatlantic Romantic writings. In my dissertation, I would like to pursue this research interest by observing not merely how writers describe visual elements of real or imaginary landscapes, but mostly how they—i.e., their authorial personas, their poetic speaker, or their characters—experience them, dwell in them (as Jonathan Bate would put it (42), following Heidegger), and render in writing their consciousness of their sensorial, emotional, and intellectual experiences. In particular, I would be interested in analyzing writers’ and literary figures’ attunement and response to the aesthetic categories of the picturesque and the sublime in their environments, and how their responses might reflect, support, or counter a particular ideology or discourse. Moreover, I intend to build an analytical bridge between my primary field of expertise—British Romantic literature and environmental aesthetics—to one of my current research interests, that is utopian—reformist or radical—communities in the nineteenth-century in the United States, among which, for instance, the vegan commune Fruitlands, co-founded in 1843 in Harvard, Massachusetts, by Transcendentalists Amos Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane. (Madsen “Alcott, Amos Bronson (1799-1888)”). Not only would such a bridge allow me to expand my critical horizon, but it would constitute a productive site of investigation into the cultural, intellectual, political, and aesthetic interconnections between British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism, especially as regards their respective environmentally-aware texts.

In my discussion of the topic of the poetics and politics of environmental attention, I would like to engage with and investigate such propositions as Richard Adelman’s claim in Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750 – 1830 (2011) that “idle contemplation” is “central to both poetic composition and human life more generally” and “possesses an intensity of experience beyond anything offered by physical exertion” (6); Eric Gidal’s suggestion that we understand “melancholy less as a failure to reintegrate within human society and more as a potentially constructive marker of our relation to a wider environmental condition,” or Jacques Khalip’s reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s melancholic skepticism in Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (2009), which states that “the difference between a brooding, skeptical reflectiveness and a paralyzing melancholy rests in what each takes to be its object of longing,” and that, whereas “skepticism is marked by a ‘healthy’ attention to lack as the incentive for intellectual agility and social mobility, melancholy fosters a love for the void” (146). In order to engage with the aforementioned propositions, my research and subsequent analysis would be attentive to the issue of genre, by attending to the similitudes and differences in the poetics of attention as they function in prose fiction, prose non-fiction, and poetry. Moreover, I intend to address issues of ecology, socio-economic class, political background, mental and physical health, as well as racial and gender dynamics in the practice of aesthetic appreciation and environmental writing.

Indeed, as many critics have noted, environmental aesthetics and how one perceives, intellectualizes, and inhabits environments are significantly conditioned by politics, class, race, and gender. For instance, regarding politics, Jacques Rancière explains in Le temps du paysage (2020) that “[u]n paysage est le reflet d’un ordre social et politique,” and thus that “[u]n ordre social et politique peut se décrire comme un paysage” (95).1 Similarly, David Higgins underlines in British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene: Writing Tambora (2017) that Romantic-era thinkers sometimes “connect[ed] meteorological phenomena to political ones” and “read sudden environmental change as signalling some change in the state of human affairs” (34). As regards gender, as Jacqueline M. Labbe discusses in Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (1998), “the prospect view and its concomitants: disinterestedness, reason, and the ability to abstract . . . situates this point of view as distinctly gendered, as, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of masculinity,” while “variety and its concomitants, interest, the detail, a perceived inability to reason, are also distinctly gendered, defining and representing femininity” (original emphasis; ix). Moreover, Labbe contends that the prospect view is associated it with the social advantage of standing dominantly over the landscape instead of being required to toil amidst, which implies that a (usually male) “writer who places himself on an eminence, who surveys the textual prospect, identifies himself with the aristocratic viewer” (xi). Furthermore, specifically in the American context, it goes without saying that dwelling in and observing an environment within an aesthetic framework is vastly different whether one is, say, a middle-class Euro-American white man living in New England, or an Indigenous person forcibly removed from their ancestral land and placed in a reservation, for instance.

Considering these issues, I intend to address the following questions: how do Romantic and Transcendentalist authors craft their poetics of attention differently in their environmentally-aware texts depending on their geographical and temporal location, their gender, class, race, mental disposition, able-bodiedness, political ideology, and overall level of adherence to white, bourgeois normativity? Do they appear aware of the gendered, classist, euro-centric, spiciest, and colonial conventions of Anglo-European environmental aesthetics? Do they subvert or reinforce these conventions? Do some writers display a poetics of attention that might be read as progressive, revolutionary, or, on the contrary, reactionary? Or perhaps individualistic, communal, or even holistic? How similar or different are British environmentally-aware writings compared to American ones? And what might be the specificities of texts produced in a fully transatlantic context? To attempt to answer these questions, I would like to mobilize a threefold corpus of primary sources: British Romantic texts; American Transcendentalist texts; and fully transatlantic texts produced by authors who crossed the Atlantic and wrote on the opposite side of their native one.

First, the British Romantic texts that I would like to examine are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and History of a Six Week’s Tour (1817), co-authored by Mary and Percy Shelley. These two texts are intertwined and are heavily informed by the unnatural, unseasonal stormy weather of the summer 1816, as well as being attuned to the local environmental aesthetic of the Franco-Swiss Alps, which they correlate with philosophy and politics (namely with the opposition between republicanism and monarchy). I would also like to analyze William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1835), which deals with an environment that I have experienced myself, displays Wordsworth’s very English, regional, and somewhat conservative environmental aesthetics, and prescribes a type of aesthetic attention required to appreciate the environments of the Lake District. Then, the American Transcendentalist texts that I would like to study are Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1844)—which, as Ridvan Adkin states, “presents a wide array of geographical, biological, and socio-political observations,” among which “the exigencies and repercussions for women” of “settler life on the frontier” and “the plight of Native Americans” (Askin 201)—and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which demonstrates that “cultural artifacts such as texts and railroad cuts also participate in our perception of ecological relationships,” while arguing that “retreat into a life of physical simplicity and mental complexity is an act that has great potential to undermine [oppressive political] structures” (Browne n. pag.). I intend to analyze what type of aesthetic attunement they construct in them, and what type of politics might be inferred from them, in an intertextual dialogue with Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes and the Shelley’s texts. Moreover, to explore my interest in utopian experiments as they relate to Romantic and/or Transcendentalist philosophy, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), inspired by his stay at the Brook Farm commune, might be relevant. Finally, an example of a fully transatlantic text to investigate might possibly be The Foresters: A Poem, Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara in the Autumn of 1804 by Scottish writer, illustrator, and ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who emigrated from Scotland to the United States. I would welcome suggestions as to which other—transatlantic or not—relevant works might be added to the corpus. The aforementioned list, of course, is only provisional and would gladly include several complementary texts to help contextualize and enrich my analysis of the core primary texts, such as, to only name a few, Percy Shelley’s political essays, relevant letters from all the aforementioned authors, as well as articles from Leigh Hunt’s journal The Examiner (1808-1886), and articles from The Dial (1840-1844), the Transcendentalist magazine co-edited by Fuller and Emerson.

Besides the obvious comparatist approach that is necessary to such an undertaking as discussing trans-temporal, geographical, and cultural texts, the primary frameworks on which I would rely are environmental aesthetics and ecocriticism, with an ecofeminist and a New Materialist bent. Following scholars like Bruno Latour, Allen Carson, Emily Brady, or Timothy Morton, I want to observe the texts of my corpus keeping in mind that the notion of the “experience of environment as an inclusive perceptual system includes such factors as space, mass, volume, time, movement, color, light, smell, sound, tactility, kinesthesia, pattern, order, and meaning” (Berleant n. pag.). In addition, I would like to draw on the field of Health Humanities, a broad, transdisciplinary field that “explores the human condition and its intersection with health, illness, and healing through the lens of the humanities and its methodologies as a means of interrogating the history and culture of medicine; exploring embodiment, selfhood, and sociality” (Health Humanities Consortium n. pag.), which might come in handy in my exploration of issues of mental and physical health in the texts of my corpus.

This PhD thesis would allow me to continue developing my current research in the field of environmental humanities applied to nineteenth-century American literature. Moreover. It would consist in a significant expansion of some of the central issues of my Master’s dissertation, namely temporal, spatial, and historical consciousness, ecological awareness, as well as the politics and the psychology of environmental aesthetics in modern English literature. For instance, I argued that, for Romantic writers, invoking opaque atmospheric phenomena (like mists and storms) was an aesthetic means to make sense of, and express their experience of living in an epochal climate of contingency and uncertainty (Zeitz 4), which aligns with Michael Boyden’s explanation in his introduction to the book Climate and American Literature that, by understanding the climate of its vast environments, the new American Republic could attempt to predict and modulate its “uncertain but plannable future” (Boyden 20). Ultimately, I hope that this PhD thesis project might shed some light on what Romantic and Transcendentalist poetics and politics of attention in environmentally-aware writings can teach us about the type of attention that is required of informed and sensible readers in order to carefully read nineteenth-century transatlantic English literatures in their context. Perhaps such engaged mindfulness might also come in handy to read our own—Western and global—temporal, spatial, climatic, and cultural environment, which has been irrevocably influenced by and linked with American cultural, political, and economic supremacy.

Not only am I a Romanticism nerd, but I am obsessed with contemporary internet-based aesthetics as they are explored on social media, especially the Cottagecore and the Dark Academia cultural crazes, which I believe are descendants of Romantic tropes. I’d love to write an article on this topic in the future, or to integrate this aspect in my PhD thesis.

A comparative, critical analysis of the original and the adaptation.