“Reading Outward” is a cluster of essays from Victorian Studies newest issue, drawn from papers delivered at the Fall 2018 North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference, with the theme "Looking Outward."
In the excerpt below, CUNY Professor of English Talia Schaffer summarizes essays from Sara Maurer, Maia McAleavey, and Lech Harris while framing them in relation to issues facing Victorian scholars today.
The entire “Reading Outward” response and essay cluster can be read for free now on JSTOR.
The 2018 NAVSA conference was called “Looking Outward,” but I heard so many talks about forms of reading that I decided to take the opportunity to think about how we read and what we read for. By “reading outward,” I mean to designate a restlessness with received wisdom, a desire to strike out into fresh ideas about literary forms and histories.
We are rethinking reading, I believe, because two critical trends are converging. For the past several years Victorianists have been debating how we read: by way of surface reading, symptomatic reading, suspicious reading, distant reading, close reading, reparative reading, paranoid reading, and digital reading. The reading wars often tacitly have constructed the text itself as a vulnerable, inert, mute entity, and the reader as an active agent. We could be hurting or helping it, consolidating similar items in bulk or zooming in on one, skimming over its surface or digging into its depths. But this vision collides with a different model of textuality that I find implicit in recent work on temporality, wherein texts are somewhat more interactive, influencing one another, carrying residual marks of previous contact, prefiguring and recasting inherited techniques. In reassessing literary history, we accept a more modest and hopefully less invasive kind of agency, the stance of the careful observer assessing changed forms over time. Theorists of queer temporality have been exploring the political affordances of finding oneself outside of conventional linear (re)productive time, and the ways in which this subject position might orient one toward suspension, looking backward, or a utopian futurity.1 This work stresses the subjective experience of temporal duration, in which time can feel suspended, slowed, frozen, simultaneous. This suggests a new model of understanding literary history beyond a simple linear chronology in which predecessors influence inheritors. In other words, considering time itself might provide a more generous and nuanced way of thinking about reading.
The three preceding articles bring historical interest to bear on the reading wars. Sara L. Maurer, Maia McAleavey, and Lech Harris each offer a radical proposition based on the surprising longevity of an early-Victorian textual structure. Their work models the ways in which a sensitive alertness to textual elements can reshape conventional literary history by steering between the Scylla of intrusive critical agency and the Charybdis of simplistic models of influence. They trace the long afterlife of 1810s-1830s readerly expectations, a richly residual presence that a careful reader can sense permeating subsequent work.
Sara L. Maurer’s study of the evangelical religious tracts of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that they discouraged sympathetic affiliation. Rather, in Maurer’s words, they “encouraged the individual reader to experience his or her own unlimited personal responsibility for developing an inner conscience in response to these texts. This weakened the tracts’ potential for creating fellow feeling among transnational communities” (224). Thus the Religious Tract Society produced stories featuring someone unlike the reader, not to encourage identification, feel community, or develop sympathy, but rather in order to “foreground . . . reading as re-experience” (226). Tract readers used the text to move back into their own memories. In the early Victorian period, people practiced a form of reading that was a kind of closed loop, a solipsistic self-reference that explicitly eschewed affiliative outreach. Maurer’s study shows that “embedded within the most social space of the Victorian social problem novel is a style of deeply asocial reading” (229).
Like Maurer, Maia McAleavey recovers a form of writing that rethinks the value of social relations. McAleavey analyzes the continuity of a genre popularized by Sir Walter Scott in the 1810s and 1820s, the chronicle, which she describes as “a narrative form that prioritizes setting over plot, the episodic over the finite, and the group over the individual” (233). A story that could go on forever and can be told from the point of view of multiple characters, the chronicle lends itself well to series fiction, as Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge found in writing their chronicles, multiple novels with a large cast of characters in a given place. McAleavey explains that the chronicle upends several seemingly universal features of Victorian fiction. . . . In moving narrative focus from the individual to the group, chronicles lose the logical shape of biography and its watershed events: birth, marriage, and death. Chronicles instead narrate a swathe of time that might be shorter or longer than a lifespan, often presented as a mere slice of an unfolding history. (234)
The chronicle eschews teleology to offer different models of temporality, historicity, place, and self. It asks us to read relationally, to see characters as part of a larger social group anchored in space and extending through time.
In the final article, Lech Harris executes a startling revision of literary history in arguing that modernist style actually perpetuates, and indeed literalizes, the earlier rhetorical norms seen in Henry Fielding and William Makepeace Thackeray, among others. The congenial, chatty, digressive narrator may seem wholly unsuited to the stringent psychological style of fin-de-siècle fiction, but Harris argues that modernist style—here, Joseph Conrad’s—subsumed rather than replaced its earlier narrative version. The difference is that the earlier version of oral narration drew on a rhetorical model of public speech, while the later used a literal transcription of speech, requiring the reader to investigate and assemble widely dispersed clues to the narratorial persona.
These three essays contribute to a new sense of history. The religious tracts teach readers to revisit their own spiritual histories, reinforcing and reinscribing that constitutive conversion experience. In so doing, the Religious Tract Society makes history into a fiercely personal account, firmly refusing any potential transnational or transperiod affiliation. Meanwhile, the chronicles—as their name implies—constitute fiction as a form of history, teaching us to register the ways in which people change over decades as they are shaped by their particular regions. This is a genre that is all about shifting nations and eras, and about the reverberations that occur when they clash—when, for instance, an elderly person trained in one era encounters new norms, or a particular region learns to define itself as a borderland against a space that claims centrality. I am also haunted by Harris’s claim that style has a history: a mode of writing we have understood as abruptly breaking with the past can be read instead as the long tail of that past. Perhaps we ought to think of literary history itself as a chronicle, an endless story without any particular resolution, in which neither central figures nor watershed events matter because we are tracking slow changes of local cultures over time.
. . .
Talia Schaffer is a Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Oxford UP, 2016); Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford UP, 2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (U of Virginia P, 2001). She is currently writing about “ethics of care” and Victorian fiction as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Read the entire “Reading Outward” cluster for free now on JSTOR!
- Reading Others Who Read: The Early-Century Print Environment of the Religious Tract Society
Sara L. Maurer - Behind the Victorian Novel: Scott's Chronicles
Maia McAleavey - Elliptical Orality: Rhetoric as Style in Conrad
Lech Harris - Response: Reading Outward
Talia Schaffer
This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.
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