James Chandler

Introduction: Doctrines, Disciplines, Discourses, Departments

The American research university assumed its current shape around the turn of the twentieth century. It has provided a resilient model for sustaining both the division of intellectual labor within universities and a coordination of programmatic activities among them. The departmentalized organization of disciplines achieved in those years continues to govern most academic work, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Yet the array of disciplines settled on in that formative moment made sense, above all, for that moment. One hundred years earlier, disciplines like English, or sociology, or art history, or anthropology would not (or could not) have been part of the scheme. And, were the university to have taken shape one hundred years later, it seems safe to speculate that it would also have looked substantially different, no doubt registering, most simply, the developments in media technology. Cinema, radio, television, and the digital media have all come into prominence since the 1890s. If we were to disregard Edmund Burke’s admonitions about the dangers of sweeping away the wisdom and power that inhere in institutional forms, if we were instead to take the advice of Descartes and clear the landscape of all residual formations in order to build anew, surely we would design a university system that looks rather different from the one we now inhabit.

On the Face of the Case: Conrad, Lord Jim, and the Sentimental Novel

837 For detailed suggestions on this essay, I’d like to thank Lauren Berlant and Bill Brown; for helpful responses, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Seamus Deane, and Tom Mitchell; for help with library work and manuscript preparation, my research assistant, Mollie Godfrey. 1. On the form of the case, see Andre Jolles, Einfache Formen (1930; Darmstadt, 1958); trans. under the title Formes Simples by AntoineMarie Buguet (Paris, 1972). And see my elaboration of Jolles’s account in James K. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), pp. 203–12. On the Face of the Case: Conrad, Lord Jim, and the Sentimental Novel

Sentiment and sensibility

In the eighteenth century the language of feeling, with its key terms of sentiment, sympathy and sensibility, was central to the discussion of man and society, manners, ethics and aesthetics. This chapter shows how sensibility was figured both as a universal human attribute and as the particular feature of modern, late eighteenth-century society. It discusses the ways in which a whole range of genres used sentimentalism to excite sympathy and assess the implications of these strategies for notions of authorship, readership and the public. The chapter focuses on the sensibility in its shifting manifestations between the 1770s, when it first became a generalized object of concern, and the politicized discussion in the French Revolution. Sensationalist philosophers, physiologists and physicians constructed the foundations on which theories of sensibility were built. The authorial, editorial and reading techniques of literary sentimentalism, identified and analysed by critics in the 1750s and 1760s, spread with astonishing swiftness in the third quarter of the century.

Arts of Transmission: An Introduction

The essays collected in this issue of Critical Inquiry range widely in both approach and subject. Some mount theoretical arguments about how best to conceive of the role ofmedia in shaping humanhistory.Others delve into the practices devoted to the creation, distribution, and preservation of knowledge, from the singing of songs in archaic Greece to the production of secrets by today’s U.S. government. All, however, address what we call arts of transmission. That odd but resonant phrase derives fromFrancis Bacon, yet its descent to us from the seventeenth century is peculiarly indirect. As John Guillory notes below, Bacon’s original Latin expression is perhaps closer to “arts of tradition” or handing down to posterity. The specific phrasingwe chose for our title is a Victorian translation of Bacon’s “ars tradendi.” Not exactly original nor yet quite an imposition, the phrase nicely exemplifies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us. The point of this issue is to explore how, historically and theoretically, that conjunction has operated in the past and continues to operate today. This is a subject that eludes disciplinary definition. Bacon’s own “arts” ranged from apparently basic activities like speaking and listening to the complexmodalities of logic and dialectic. They also includedwhatwe think of as modes of communication or media—orality, writing, and printing— though we would nowadays add digital systems to the list; nevertheless, all of Bacon’s arts remain pertinent. They embrace now, as they did then, the principal ways of organizing, arguing for, and expressing new claims. The phrase is useful because it indicates that we may do well to consider these practices collectively: in a spirit of Baconian experimentation, as it were, to

Around 1980, Seamus Heaney in Chicago

The late Seamus Heaney was so great a poet that we may not always fully appreciate the remarkable body of critical prose he left behind. He wrote about literature with extraordinary verve; no surprise there. Beyond the stylistic virtuosity, however, he was a keen theorist of his craft and a learned scholar of its traditions, ancient and modern. He was also an extraordinary conversationalist: informed, open, inquisitive, witty, unpretentious. All of these virtues are on display in three pieces that Critical Inquiry was fortunate enough to publish between 1977 and 1982 and that have been newly posted on its website.1 The thanks are largely due in the first place to the good offices of Frank Kinahan, who was in those years finishing a book on the Irish Yeats and beginning another book on the promising new generation of Northern Irish poets. Kinahan’s instinct was prescient, since all of them—Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, and, most prominently, Heaney himself—became bright stars in the literary firmament. Sadly, Kinahan did not live to complete his book about them; it would be left to able critics like Helen Vendler, Patricia Coughlan, David Lloyd, Clair Wills, and Matt Campbell to rise to the diverse critical challenges posed by the work of this supremely talented cohort. Heaney himself had already won major honors by 1981, but the Nobel Prize was still a decade and a half away. The brief five-year period of these Critical Inquiry pieces was particularly formative for him, I believe, and in ways that the interview with Kinahan obliquely conveys. It was during this

London in the 1790s

Caleb Williams, fleeing from Fernando Falkland and his creature, his all-seeing spy Gines, repeatedly determines to conceal himself in London. Throughout the eighteenth century, London had become an increasingly divided city, as those who could afford to do so moved into the squares and wide streets of the West End. By the end of 1792, France, newly declared a republic, was at war with Austria and Prussia, and the movement for parliamentary reform had revived in Britain. Thus for most of the 1790s London was a city divided politically, but the division was as unequal as were the economic, cultural and geographic divisions. In the highest levels of the political world, the breakdown of cordiality between the supporters of Pitts government and the Foxite Whigs was confirmed in the clubs of St Jamess Street. The government joined with loyalist opinion in blaming the LCS also for the outrages of 29 October 1795.