Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History by Orrin N. C. Wang (review)

As the introduction to this provocatively titled book warns, Romantic Sobriety is not strictly about either sobriety or addictive excess, at least not in the usual senses in which those troubling categories have been interrogated by Romanticist scholars. Instead, through a dizzying combination of meta-theoretical critique, close reading, and historical analysis, Orrin N. C. Wang examines what he calls a “tropological understanding of sensation and sobriety” both within Romanticism itself and in the rejection of Romanticism’s “messy habits” witnessed in post-Romantic theory and criticism (p. 2). Applying the same theoretical acuity he deployed in Fantastic Modernity (1996), Wang examines the complex relationships between “sensation” as a multi-valenced figure in Romantic and post-Romantic narratives and the construction of a “sober” counter-narrative by which both Romanticism and postmodernist theory attempt to contain or expel the sensational. For Wang, “Romanticism” names precisely that shifting series of discursive figurations of the discontinuity between sensation and thought that marks “sober” latter-day deconstructionist and Marxist critiques of figuration, revolution, history and commodification; in this regard, the book aims to “clarif[y]” our cultural “investments” in constructions of Romanticism over the centuries (p. 285).

Wang divides his examination of the tropologies of sensation and sobriety into three sections, each of which teases out the difficulties in defining the relationship between sensation and concepts of Romantic “Periodicity,” to use the title of the first section of the book. The two chapters of this inaugural section limn the historical problematic of a Romantic periodicity that is both defined through figures of sensation and sobriety and that “underwrites all our attempts at periodization” (p. 4). Specifically, this model of periodization “is structured by both a sober suspicion of Romanticism’s seductive mystifications and, simultaneously, a critical bad faith inherent in any attempt to realize the sober knowledge of Romanticism, historical or otherwise, in a positive manner” (p. 15).

This insight into the Romantic impulse toward both “the negativity of passion and the sobriety of reason” (p. 27), initially documented in key texts of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, and others sets in motion the dazzling array of figural deconstructions, dialectical critiques, and other theoretical and critical maneuvers in the book as a whole, beginning with the second chapter, on Kant. If, as Chapter 1 argues, Romanticism self-identifies as a discursive field heavily invested in literary, political, and cultural tropes of a problematic “sobriety,” then Chapter 2’s analysis of the figure of “genius” in Kant’s third Critique extends the argument by “elaborating how Romanticism underlies the exceptionality of all historical identities” (p. 15, emphasis added). Kant’s genius is a master trope for the kind of figure Wang returns to repeatedly throughout Romantic Sobriety: acting as both an “originary” principle that “gives rule to art” and as a “mediating” principle between nature and art, Kant’s figure of genius defines an historically specific Romantic identification with “originality” that nonetheless breaks down by virtue of its very figurality, its catachrestic function as an “origin that cannot explain itself” (p. 51).

Such figural constructions of Romanticism’s own sense of its historical moment define a critical “sobriety” for Wang that is both “Romantic” and, when viewed through the lens of Marxist and postmodern theory, contemporary. Indeed, the four chapters of the book’s second section examine how theorists such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žžek soberly problematize Romantic divisions between the material and ideational in ways that recapitulate Romanticism’s own sober reflections. Crucial to the arguments of all four chapters is the notion of a “sensation of meaning” (p. 61 and passim), a ghostly figure that scandalizes the very divisions between the literal and figural in ways that also trope constructions of historical identity, historical revolution, and commodification. This notion constitutes a “non-phenomenal sensation tied to figure and resemblance” (p. 136) that the critiques of contemporary theorists such as Michaels and Žžek try—unsuccessfully...