Teaching with Anachronism
A graphic of the “plot lines” from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, each describing one of the four volumes of the comic work
The question of pedagogy came up during at least two Genealogies of Modernity summer seminars. How can we translate what we’ve discussed at these seminars into our undergraduate classrooms? How can we teach with and beyond the standard narratives our disciplines offer about how we became modern so that our students can critically and flexibly parse the limits of those standard narratives, weigh alternative narratives, and explore the question of how we tell the stories of the past?
I was also struck by something one of the other graduate students, Kathryn Mogk, said during one of the seminars two summers ago (you can hear her comment on the first episode of the GenMod Podcast): “Every age has to retell the story of the past in order to lead up to its own present moment.” Kathryn’s example was American modernist poets rewriting literary history to promote the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets as part of their poetic lineage. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century coined the name “metaphysical poets” as a disparagement of their elaborate conceits. Thinking of history as teleology—that we tell stories about the past in order to explain how we arrived at the present—certainly made sense in the context of my own area of specialty, eighteenth-century British literature. Thinkers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century explained their own era by recasting the middle ages as the “Dark Ages” and privileging the classical past.
But who has constructed the eighteenth century? Many would agree that the Victorians did the most damage to the perception of the eighteenth century. It took a long time for Jane Austen to recover from her makeover into a prim, soft-spoken matron. James Boswell’s ancestors were so ashamed of his legacy that they hid his portrait in the attic, only taking it down so that, according to Leo Damrosch’s new book The Club, “visitors could take potshots at it with a pistol.” Thackeray said that each page of Sterne’s novels contained a “latent corruption—a hint, as of impure presence.” Richard Steele never quite recovered from Macaulay’s dismissal, in spite of the valiant efforts of scholars working to rehabilitate his reputation in the mid-twentieth century. And as we discussed at GenMod II with Karen Detlefsen, professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, it was the nineteenth century that was largely responsible for excluding many important women philosophers from the canon.
But the status of eighteenth-century writers began to change in the early twentieth century, when modernists like Virginia Woolf threw off their Victorian shackles and began to wonder, “who can I read that my father and mother would disapprove of?” Her answer? Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. Fortunes were on the rise again for eighteenth-century writers, starting in the twentieth century: major scholarly editions of Burney, Boswell, Walpole, and Johnson were in the works, and the important recovery process of neglected writers gained steam. Scholars studying the eighteenth century today clearly owe a lot to the work of previous generations of twentieth-century scholars. It is also the case that our perception of the eighteenth century has been shaped by twentieth-century perspectives and sentiments. But as much as we have made the eighteenth century, the eighteenth century has also made us. If it is true that we tell the story of the past to create a new story for the future, then the eighteenth century is inextricably bound up in what it means to be a “modern” person living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Without the stories we tell about the eighteenth century, we would not be who we are today.
What would it look like to design a class that considers what I’ve just discussed? For a while now, I’ve been mulling over possible syllabi, and the class that’s beginning to take shape in my mind would pair eighteenth-century texts with twentieth and twenty-first century media and would bring together a mix of commentaries, essays, adaptions, retellings, and modernizations. This idea for a class would not necessarily be a replacement for the traditional historical literature survey course but a supplement that explores the questions that surveys are not always designed to ask: How does the present mediate the past? In what ways has the past created the present?
Here’s my syllabus wish list, organized in no particular order and as if time were no object:
The Rake’s Progress is an example of transhistorical artistic collaboration and of the neoclassical trend in twentieth-century music: this 1947 opera features music by Stravinsky, a libretto by W.H. Auden, and is based on the series of paintings by William Hogarth.
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749): Kubrick’s film is an especially good example of how a text can be mediated through several different time periods, since we in the twenty-first century view a 1970s interpretation of a Victorian novel, which is itself an interpretation of the eighteenth-century picaresque novels of Fielding and Smollett.
Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) demonstrates the influence of the eighteenth-century comedy of manners. Stillman is interested in the ends of eras and the foibles of the young, so it pairs well with Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), itself the last gasp of Restoration Comedy. Both Congreve’s play and Stillman’s Last Days were flops at the box office.
Cast Away (2000) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719): a look at the lasting popularity of the genre known as the “Robinsonade” and the castaway as the quintessential character of modernity.
Yorgos Lanthimos’sThe Favourite (2018) uses the court of Queen Anne to think about women’s political agency, which makes it an interesting pairing with Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), a bestselling utopian novel about a society of women dedicated to education, art, and Christian philanthropy
Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Woolf’s essay on A Sentimental Journey in The Second Common Reader: Laurence Sterne has often been hailed as the first modernist writer. His experimentation with prose style and his breaking of narrative convention seems to anticipate the novels of Joyce and Woolf.
Samuel Beckett began (but did not finish) a play about Samuel Johnson called Human Wishes. For another perspective on Johnson from a prominent modern writer, we’ll look at Jorge Luis Borges’s Lecture on Johnson and Boswell.
Star Trek took its cue from Captain Cook’s voyages to the Pacific by borrowing names: Captain Cook becomes Captain Kirk, Cook’s ship Endeavour becomes the USS Enterprise, etc. Thematically, Star Trek shares with Enlightenment-era scientists and philosophers a preoccupation with the tensions between rationality and emotion.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2016) is the Cato of today. Both Addison’s Cato (1713) and Hamilton are blockbuster stage productions that comment on current politics and national sensibilities by setting their stories in their respective founding eras: ancient Rome for Cato and eighteenth-century America for Hamilton.
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels both offer alternative worlds and futures as a way to think about and challenge and examine the ideas of cultural, scientific, and political progress. 2001 looks back at the eighteenth century to look at the future. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century by Samuel Madden (1733) (thanks to Tim Barr for introducing me to this text!), which was inspired by Gulliver’s Travels, offers an eighteenth-century speculation about what the twentieth century will look like.
