The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (review)

The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830. By Clifford Siskin. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. x + 285 pp. $39.95.

"History," in the words of Michel de Certeau, "endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice," and therefore, as we know from the many recent accounts of the work of historicization, the writer of history should specify two places: the "present that is the place of practice" and the "past that is its object." Fredric Jameson speaks similarly of the need to follow "the path of the object and the path of the subject, the historical origins of the things themselves and that more intangible historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand those things." ¹ The literary historicisms that have obeyed the Jamesonian injunction--"Always historicize!"--have been remarkably self-conscious, even self-confessional, as in prefaces and afterwords in which the self or subjectivity otherwise held in scare quotes returns full force in the voice and vivid situation of the historical critic.

The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin's sequel to his important 1988 book, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, is one of the most self-reflexive of all the new histories. Its references to late twentieth-century culture (bungee jumping, numerous Hollywood films) and anecdotes from the peculiar culture of academic literary business (conferences of the Modern Language Association, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies) pepper the argument. Siskin's critical motivation now is the proliferation of new technologies, including film and the Internet, that are disrupting the norms of print culture. This most recent phase of media revolution has contributed to real violence in our culture (Siskin's recurrent example is the fatal burning of the New York City subway-token-booth collector in apparent imitation of the movie The Money Train in 1995), as well as to institutional crises in the humanities, expressed in death-of-literature litanies and the awareness that "staying within one's discipline, being a professional, and knowing and working--or trying to get work--within an English department have become newly unsettling undertakings" (8). Such events prompt Siskin to ask, "What are these technologies doing to us?" His answer takes the indirect form of studying a time and place, which he defines as Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "when the newly disturbing technology was writing itself" and seeking to "reconstruct the shock that accompanied its initial spread" (2). As in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse's Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (1992), writing itself is labeled the central cause of historical change, and what it changed was a nation's ways of knowing and working. Both modern disciplinarity, as the enabling condition of knowledge production, and modern professionalism, as the corresponding set of work "behaviors," emerged in this period as means of controlling and "naturalizing" (one of this book's keywords) the unruly spread of print. At the intersection of these altered organizations of knowledge and labor, "Literature" (another keyword, as it is for Raymond Williams and others) assumed a primary role "as a specialization, but one that all of the others had in common--the prerequisite for entering them as autonomous professional fields" (7). Literature is "engendered," Siskin reminds us throughout; in other words, it is both a historically specific category, occupying just one moment in a larger history of writing, and it follows and reproduces fault lines of gender, systematically excluding women not so much from the activity of writing as from the newly dignified role of a "professional" writer (2, 54-78).

As will be clear from this brief account of the argument, the guiding spirit or avowed underpresence of this study is Foucault, the genealogical source Siskin shares with Armstrong and...