Form at the Limits: Response

Cannon Schmitt "Scholars are mediums too." So writes Mary Poovey in her response to the papers she selected from the 2005 NAVSA Conference, published in last year's NAVSA issue of Victorian Studies (255). Having been invited to respond to work presented at the 2006 joint NASSR/NAVSA Conference, I found myself unable to forget those words. The whole event became a sort of sonic palimpsest: accompanying each panel, beneath whatever arguments were being made or readings proffered, ran the susurrus of that caveat. In a transparent and perhaps banal way, it was impossible not to personify one aspect of Poovey's broader polemic about the pivotal but frequently neglected place of mediation—of what comes between text and context, idea and incarnation, object and interpretation. Together with Carolyn Williams's reflections on "the ways genre matters" (295), which also appeared in last year's NAVSA issue, that polemic brought into focus what I found noteworthy about the papers I have selected. Whether analyzing a scientific biography, a dinosaur replica, or a quasi-Darwinian tract of political theory, each scholar proceeds by way of admirably close attention to medium, genre, or, to invoke a term that subsumes both and more besides, form. By placing form at the center of their projects, the authors refuse to treat histories, ideas, or ideologies as though the particular shapes they assume are of no significance. But if these papers thus bear out Poovey's and Williams's contentions about the consequentiality of form, they also suggest the potential costs attendant upon too single-minded a commitment to respecting formal boundaries. In some sense they must do so, since the field to which they belong, cultural studies of science, owes its existence to the plausibility and presumed critical profitability of efforts to read back and forth between scientific genres, practices, or institutions and other cultural phenomena.

An array of such efforts was on offer at the conference, in part because the theme of NASSR, "Scientia and Techne," apparently had a determining effect on many contributions to the officially theme-less but in fact quite science-minded NAVSA half of things. Among the most exciting papers at both ends of the historical spectrum were those that brought a combination of historicist and formalist analysis to bear on a scientific archive. Alan Bewell's seminar paper "Traveling Natures," for instance, speculated on relations between the conservative poetics of Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1791) and that poem's radically modern vision of the natural world as "undergoing ceaseless change and transformation . . . and inescapably bound up with global commerce, industry, and consumption." Neville Hoad's "The Evolution of the 'Homosexual': The Invert as Symptom," to take another example, seized on the multiple significations of the obsolete term "invert" to canvass its lost but potentially recuperable political possibilities. Both Bewell and Hoad scrutinized certain formal features (of the heroic couplet and the sexological taxonomy) even as both also strove to forge connections between form and content, and across both historical divides and the divides that distinguish formal matters from matters political or ecological. The three papers on which I will comment similarly display centripetal as well as centrifugal impulses, insisting on the formal specificity of their objects even as they reveal trans- or extra-formal connections to other objects and to larger discursive and ideological formations.

Mary Orr begins her paper, medium-like, by channeling two voices. The first is that of a historian of science for whom biography assumes a position definitively subordinate to science proper because the scientific biography is defined "in contradistinction to the remit and truth value of the scientific treatise" (277). The second belongs to the exponent of restrictive early nineteenth-century gender norms for whom "the great European scientist in her laboratory was a contradiction in terms, and the female scientific explorer was nearly non-existent, as were her published discoveries" (278). Enter Mrs. R. Lee, born Sarah Wallis, who, as Mrs. T. Edward Bowdich, completed and published Excursions to Madeira and Porto Santo, during the Autumn of 1823, while on his third voyage to Africa by Edward T. Bowdich (1825). Despite...