Specialized Materials 2000

This year's specialized materials review will offer a brief introduction to the work of one of the present day's most important and innovative sociological theorists: Anthony Giddens. Giddens' body of work is not yet widely deployed in the analysis of literature, and certainly it is diverse and not always applicable beyond Giddens' own discipline. However, several of his books from the 1990s are not only important sociological treatises, they may also prove quite useful for those of us working in Victorian cultural studies. I will explore some possibilities for the application of Giddensian theory below and conclude with an examination of three books published within the past two years that provide more comprehensive overviews of his work.

Giddens, the current Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, is a highly prolific writer who has written, edited, or co-edited over thirty books and several hundred articles and reviews since he first began publishing in the early 1970s. He has recently received a lot of public attention for his work on contemporary political systems, especially in The Third Way (1998), which has influenced Tony Blair and the policies of the current Labour government in Great Britain. But while Giddens' proposal to find new ways of moving beyond the binary of left- and right-wing thinking are certainly intriguing, they are not directly applicable to the study of nineteenth-century poetry. Instead I want to look back to some of Giddens' most innovative work from the early 1990s (before moving on to more recent publications), ones which are quite appropriate for the interpretation of Victorian literature, including poetry.

The first book I would like to recommend to all readers of this journal is The Consequences of Modernity from 1990. In it Giddens presents his general argument (one which he will deepen over the course of several subsequent books) that "rather than entering a period of post-modernity, we [today] are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than before" (p. 3). His most intriguing analysis concerns the movement, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, toward a radical disembedding of social systems, by which social relations are lifted out of simply "local contexts of interaction" (p. 21) and redirected toward national and global engagements. He explores the changing nature of "trust" during the same time period, which is placed no longer "in individuals, but in abstract capacities" (p. 26) and has led to a sense of expanding possibilities for defining the "self" and its responsibilities. And, finally, he traces the result of these and other changes in the proliferation of forms of reflexivity, whereby "social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character" (p. 38). As Giddens notes toward the end of his book, "For the ordinary individual, all of this does not add up to feelings of secure control over day-to-day life circumstances" (p. 146). Modern life--especially in the past two hundred years--is thus characterized by increasingly intense forms of ontological anxiety.

For students and critics of the nineteenth century, one can find numerous potential applications of Giddens' observations. One need look no farther than the questioning of purpose and fixity of social definitions inherent in poems as diverse as Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters," Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" to find evidence of widely and thoroughly unsettled social relations. "In whom and in what does one trust?" are questions hanging over all of Victorian literature. And in Arnold's own literary and social criticism, we also find an intense interest in a re-securing and re-embedding of cultural meanings. Of course, in considering twentieth-century poetry we recognize just how unsuccessful such temporary assuagements of anxiety actually were.

Giddens' builds upon these insights in his next major work, Modernity and Self-Identity (1991). Subtitled "Self...