CIRCULATION: THE MANY LIVES OF "AMERICAN ROMANTICISM"
← Lecture notes on "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" where the ideas of copying are explored through the examination of Bartleby's character and his relationship to other characters and the environment. These understandings of copying are carried across the understandings of the fiction, discussions of book production (during the machine-process period 1800-1950), and explorations of cultural and societal understandings through expressive media (literature).
Working With Form: "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" -Herman Melville
In these lecture notes, Bartleby is discussed as being a representation of humanity (drawing on the last line of the story, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"). The work his character does as a scrivener is to copy law documents. The next part of the title refers to Wall-Street, a wording that could be replaced with wording such as corrupted-transitions, or obstructed-mobility (following various associations with "Wall-Street," Wall" and "Street").
To be reconstructed, the title now reads: Humanity, the Copier: A Story of Corrupted-Transitions
Reconstructing the wording of the title brings rise to new types of questions. Culture in nineteenth-century America begins to be understood as "iteration rather than origination" (in Meredith McGill's phrase). It is the result of mass production while at the same time holding the place (like a wall) of the thing that is being reproduced by others. We are also inclined to ask how copying (in the cultural context) creates modes of mobility while at the same time creating limitations.
Class Session Title, "Slantwise Truths": Emily Dickinson
Dickinson frustrates the sort of structured filing of uniformity that Bartleby decided to abandon at The Lawyer's office. Bartleby's character stopped copying and refused to eat what the narrator was bringing him. He stopped producing what had already been done, and essentially Emily Dickinson has done the same thing.
Dickinson's writing defies a number or recognition practices due to the form and materiality of her work. As a result, her work is a challenge to the idea of "genre." (This draws on Lisa Gitelman's definition of the term as "a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse" from Paper Knowledge.)
← A recognition process was mapped out in the lecture Slantwise Truths and put into practice as the class analyzed Dickinson's Poem "Surprise is like a thrilling - pungent." Our process follows (at a slant from Prownian analysis).
Identify:
A) Lexical: Literal topic and meaning of the written text.
B) Semiotic: Signs and chains of reference or "associations."
C) Form/Materiality (formal and forensic): What is formally conspicuous? How might it contribute to the meaning?
It is clear that Dickinson's work breaks the norm regarding form and medium. Our preconceived understandings of genre and our inherent need to file categorize information in universal, searchable ways force the prioritization of certain information which in turn has its effects on the types of questions we ask (related back to "metadata" considerations you can see in the notes above). It is difficult to track certain types of evidence regarding specific questions about Dickinson's writing because there is no rigid structure that provides easy recognition.
Here is a link to my reflection on asking a good question, as well as a picture I drew to try to understand the process: Theory of a Question. (This is in conversation with Kyla Wazana Tompkin's essay "We Aren't Here to Learn What We Already Know.") I drew on my own shortfalls in attempting to stage an analysis of Dickinson's work for the class. (Dr. Guerra had offered me time to lead discussion in this session.) I knew what I wanted to say--summarizing parts of Virginia Jackson's Dickinson's Misery, applying it to our ideas about Dickinson--but I struggled with how to frame an argument as a prompt to discussion. As a teacher, I realized that the question is sometimes more difficult than the answer.