The Philosopher in the Workshop: Romanticism and the New Utilitarianism

Romanticism has been played in a symphonic and sometimes cacophonous range of major and minor keys over the past two centuries, from the earliest critics who dismissed the new poetry of their day as the fulminations of a “sect of poets” driven by “a splenetic and idle discontent,”¹ to Arnoldian humanists who embraced the affirmative power of the imagination as an antidote to the strife of politics and industrialism, to Practical Critics who sought to cleanse literature of history by isolating (and elevating) the poems as verbal icons, to history-from-below leftists who foregrounded the age’s unruly mix of poetry and politics, to New Historicists who seized on the ways that Romantic poetry was itself marked by a swerve from history, to Book Historians who pointed out that history didn’t come from below or anywhere else; it had been there all along, immanent in the modes of production, hidden in plain sight if only we hadn’t gotten used to taking the books themselves for granted.

Through it all, Romanticism has proven to be extraordinarily amenable to approaches that favor slow reading, thick description, deep time, long revolutions, and hot chronology. Whether critics were trying to rescue literature from history or to redeem history through literature, to restore literature to a fuller sense of history or to highlight the ways that the literature was marked by a denial of history, Romantic poetry has always been a kind of literary canary in the critical coalmines, a most-intense example of changing ideas, not just about why literature matters but about much broader questions about the humanities and that infinitely thornier thing, humanism itself.

I want to offer a new variation on these arrangements by asking how knowing more about the struggles and achievements of this period can help with the challenge of making the case for the public value of the humanities today in the face of pressures from skeptics who demand to know what use the humanities are: what sort of metrics we can provide to demonstrate their impact, or how they can contribute to the challenge of solving real life problems. In doing so, I take my cue from Jerome McGann’s reminder, in so many of his books, that the task of responding to new phenomena often demands a richer understanding of the past. As he pointed out back when it was still necessary to reassure literary critics that we did not need to fear that rough beast called the world wide web, it is often when developments seem the most unprecedented that we are best served by paying closer attention to these longer historical contexts when “so much of what is apparent today was being forecast.”²

Few interventions have insisted on the urgency of this need for a renewed historical consciousness in an era whose capacity for memory is increasingly shaped by “the machineries of the just-in-time” more eloquently than McGann’s extraordinary call in A New Republic of Letters for a new philology, or what McGann, echoing Susanne Langer, calls a “philology in a new key”: still a focus on “the documentary record” driven by a “love of the word” in its most materialist forms, but now in ways that are animated by a recognition of the “significant practical and institutional pressure for change” that information technology is exerting in “humanities research and scholarship.”³ Drawing on Edward Said’s call for a “Return to Philology” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, but even more on D. F. McKenzie’s emphasis on the sociology of the text, A New Republic of Letters offers a trenchant reminder that coming to terms with the undeniable fact that “the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures” involves a deeper recognition that this shift must be measured in terms of loss as well as gain, and more than that, that we can never be in a position to adequately understand what that loss will amount to. If our work today is shaped by the uncomfortable paradox that...