Harvard University Press Blog

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?

"So Overcome By Such a Trifle"

In a round-up of recent “sex novels and novellas” in last week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella refers to a moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion as “one of the most erotic episodes in Western literature.” In that scene, Anne Elliot is tending to an ill nephew in the presence of Captain Wentworth (a former suitor, returned), and Charles Hayter (who sees the valiant Wentworth as a threat to his station), when another nephew enters the room, bent on attention:

There being nothing to be eat, he could only have some play; and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him—ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

“Walter,” said she, “get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.”

“Walter,” cried Charles Hayter, “why do you not do as you are bid? Do not you hear your aunt speak? Come to me, Walter, come to cousin Charles.”

But not a bit did Walter stir.

In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief—the manner—the silence in which it had passed—the little particulars of the circumstance—with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay. It might have been an opportunity of watching the loves and jealousies of the four; they were now all together, but she could stay for none of it. It was evident that Charles Hayter was not well inclined towards Captain Wentworth. She had a strong impression of his having said, in a vext tone of voice, after Captain Wentworth’s interference, “You ought to have minded me, Walter; I told you not to teaze your aunt;” and could comprehend his regretting that Captain Wentworth should do what he ought to have done himself. But neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor any body’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.

To modern readers, versed in the Nicholson Bakers and Helen DeWitts that are Acocella’s real subject, it’s an exceptionally subtle scene. Which, of course, is her point in praising it.

Robert Morrison’s new annotated edition of Persuasion—from which the above passage is excerpted—presents this moment along with Charles Edmond Brock’s illustration of it, dated 1898:

In Defense of Yesterday's Papers

In her new book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks presents the results of her year-long experiment in rereading, undertaken in an attempt to understand what pleasure we gain from indulging in familiar books. Spacks, a past President of The Academy of Arts & Sciences and a National Book Award finalist, was interested in exploring how the particular joys of rereading old books can outweigh the faint guilt that attends the avoidance of all of those new and classic titles we’ve yet to read even once. She learned that the experience of rereading is intensely personal, an occasion to revisit one’s former self or selves, to balance familiar feelings with new realizations:

The dynamic tension between stability and change lies at the heart of rereading. Every renewed exchange between book and reader contains elements of both, and both provide pleasure. Our psychic needs vary, and reread books answer different needs at different times. Seeking solace, we return to a treasured children’s book. A beloved piece of light fiction answers our yearning for pure recreation. We find excitement in a rousing plot even though we already know how it will turn out; we contemplate our past as we reread something first encountered in adolescence.

On Rereading is an intensely personal book that has made many of us here at HUP consider our own rereading experiences and habits. When we sat down to record Spacks talking about the book, we couldn’t resist adding in some thoughts of our own. Take a look:

 

We’ve also been thinking about the rereading experiences of booksellers. They’re surrounded by books all day, the familiar old titles and the never-ending stream of exciting new ones that it’s their job to digest on behalf of the rest of us. If anyone should know the faint guilt of rereading, it’s booksellers. Do they even try to reread? HUP Sales Rep John Eklund, who wrote earlier this year about rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, polled a few booksellers about whether they’ve had memorable experiences rereading.

Here’s Conrad Silverberg of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company:

I first read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in 1985 and, of course, fell in love with his elevated, almost biblical prose and complex yet readable writing style. I was, however, utterly in ignorance about anything else about the book (its historical setting or the real people he fictionalized). Now, some twenty-six years later, I am better informed (having read Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen, The War of a Thousand Deserts by Brian Delay and Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne) and can safely say that, sometimes you really do not need to be well-informed to love a book. I am loving it again for the same reasons I did the last time.

And here’s Mark Paprocki, also of Boswell Book Company:

The Life of John and George Keats

One gets a clear sense of the direction of Denise Gigante’s new book The Keats Brothers from its subtitle: The Life of John and George. That use of the singular (“life” as opposed to “lives”) is itself an argument against the standard telling of John’s life, in which George is usually cast as a mere bit player, or, worse, something of a villain. With The Keats Brothers, though, Gigante sets out to give us an understanding of a relationship that was absolutely central to John, and to the composition of some of his finest poems. In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey commends Gigante for succeeding “brilliantly.”

George Keats, two years younger than John, was swept up by the emigration fever of 1818, when many ambitious young men left England. Gigante writes of this as a moment when the modern world was coming into being, with the industrial revolution and capitalization propelling a complete reshaping of society. It was John who helped to answer the question of the role of the poet in this new modern society, and it was the entrepreneurial George who was his closest link to it, as he made his way in the U.S. Gigante’s account recreates George’s adventures, and her presentation of the rich correspondence between the brothers shows that their relationship withstood George’s absence.

In addition to being a lively story of the 19th century, The Keats Brothers is an important contribution to our appreciation of John’s poetry. As Gigante explains in an episode of the HUP Podcast (listen here), understanding the relationship between Keats and his brothers helps us to understand the haunting quality of some of the poems for which John is best remembered. His well-known odes, written with such pace in 1819, are colored by John’s sorrow over the new distance between him and George, and also by the recent death of their youngest brother Tom. The new perspective that Gigante offers here also helps readers to grasp the transatlantic context of John’s writing. 

When John died of tuberculosis and a severe pulmonary hemorrhage in 1821, at just twenty-five, George had just been back in England seeking more capital for his American ventures. He’d returned to the U.S. and didn’t learn of John’s demise until months later. John’s death is often projected onto George, and his absence at John’s end is cast as abandonment, but Gigante shows that George’s emigration had been inspired by his desire to provide for his siblings, who’d been orphaned young. Throughout The Keats Brothers, she works to show that George was far from a scoundrel, and that his life was as emblematic of the time as John’s:

However much it might jar with the traditional version of the story to suggest, the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism. While the medium of their dreams may have differed, the two eldest Keats brothers—“Man of Genius” and “Man of Power”—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism.

That bit comes from Gigante’s Prologue, where she invites her readers for an adventure on which they’ll join generations in trying to see the world through the eyes of John Keats. 

Robert Morrison on Annotating Austen

Robert Morrison’s take on Persuasion is the second installment in our series of sumptuously illustrated and engagingly annotated editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Persuasion can be the most disorienting of Austen’s works, but, to Morrison, it’s also the most profound, and contains her most compelling and adult love story. In the exchange below, we asked Morrison about the experience of editing Austen.

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Q: An acclaimed biographer of Thomas De Quincey, you’ve also served as editor of De Quincey’s collected works. How many of the techniques you developed in that role carried over to editing Persuasion: An Annotated Edition? Where did you find you needed to develop new approaches?

When I worked on De Quincey, I learned a lot about what kind of information readers are looking for, where to find reliable sources for that information, how to corroborate it effectively and accurately, and so on. Perhaps most importantly, when I edited De Quincey I worked with a large number of his manuscripts, and this proved invaluable when I came to edit Persuasion, for there are two cancelled manuscript chapters from the novel housed in the British Library, and I drew heavily on my experience of working with De Quincey’s manuscripts when I transcribed Austen’s two cancelled chapters.

There are, however, key differences between editing De Quincey and editing Austen. De Quincey is an essayist and immensely erudite. He likes to parade his knowledge, so that editing him often means annotating references to Greek and Roman history, German philosophy, British and French politics, and a wide ranging series of contemporary events. Austen, on the other hand, is a novelist, and the emphasis when editing her is frequently on her immensely insightful views on social structures, sexual politics, economic pressures, and individual obligations and aspirations. Editing her means developing a very clear sense of the difference between riding in a barouche and riding in a curricle, of what it means to command a frigate as opposed to a sloop, of the implications of being the daughter of a baronet rather than the wife of a knight, and so on. Perhaps most memorably for me, there is a moment in Chapter Twelve when Captain Wentworth is speaking to Charles Musgrove about who should remain with Louisa Musgrove after she has fallen on the Cobb. Wentworth speaks of “Mrs. Charles Musgrove,” and he ought to speak with the same formality of “Miss Anne Elliot.” But he does not. Under duress, and with a dawning sense of her worth, he calls her “Anne,” a burst of emotion that reveals how close he still feels to her. I am not even going to tell you how many times I had read the novel before I noticed this wonderful nuance! Editing Persuasion proved to me how remarkably incisive Virginia Woolf was when she observed that Austen “fills every inch of her canvas with observation” and “fashions every sentence into meaning.”

Q: The commentary-in-the-margins format of Persuasion: An Annotated Edition means that you’re sharing a page with Jane Austen. How did you approach going toe-to-toe with one of the foremost stylists in the English language?

Knowing my prose was going to appear right beside Austen’s really did change the way I approached writing my commentary. Endnotes of course mean that you are at the back of the volume. If readers want to consult you they can, but it means they have to stop reading the text, journey to the end of the book, and track down the relevant note. Some readers will choose to do this on some occasions, but many others will consult you only infrequently, if at all. Footnotes are on the same page as the text, but they are still relegated to a decidedly secondary position in relation to it, and readers consult or ignore the notes as they choose. I have to say that, in the past, I found writing endnotes or footnotes quite a comfortable position. In effect, it enables you to say to your reader, “I am here with relevant information if you want me, but I don’t want to intrude on your reading experience, and if you’d rather carry on without me, that is fine.”

In Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, however, the situation is very different. My annotation runs parallel to Austen’s text, meaning that it is a good deal harder for readers to ignore! I have found this very exciting. I have tried to use the commentary to illuminate the text as often as I can, and from as many different angles as I can, and to emphasize both what I believe to be central in Persuasion, and what the finest critics from Austen’s day to ours have written about it. I have attempted to produce a commentary that is in immediate and active dialogue with her text, rather than in a relationship that is more distant and intermittent. I hope this kind of sustained and expansive commentary enables readers to enjoy a more intimate relationship with Persuasion, and to move more seamlessly between text and annotation.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Becoming Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s new biography, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, focuses on the 1830s, when a young, restless Londoner was just becoming the novelist who would define an era. Douglas-Fairhurst’s approach to the book was to make the reader feel all of the insecurity that the young Dickens felt by avoiding the usual biographer’s tendency to telegraph his subject’s eventual success. In the exchange below we ask Douglas-Fairhurst to explain that approach, and whether his book should change the way we read Dickens.

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Q. You’ve referred to Becoming Dickens as something of an experiment, in that it’s driven by a counterfactual approach that most biographers and historians would typically avoid. What led you to embrace that approach for this book?

The inspiration for this book was the realization that life-writing often seems to be strangely at odds with life itself. However much we try to organize the future – from making New Year resolutions to taking out life insurance – everyday existence is alarmingly good at resisting our attempts to give it a shape. As the old joke has it, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” However, you wouldn’t know that from reading most biographies. In the biographer’s hands, every part of their subject’s life becomes just another piece in a neat jigsaw-puzzle; every stray detail is shuffled into a meaningful pattern. Because the biographer already knows how their story will end, every sentence starts to resemble an arrow whooshing towards its target. And that can be comforting to read: biographies allow us to entertain fantasies of a world in which everything happens for a reason; chance is mastered by destiny.

What I wanted to do in Becoming Dickens was to restore the experience of the writer’s early years – a period in which every decision he took, and every sentence he wrote, was a set of forking paths. My aim was not just to follow in Dickens’s footsteps, but to put the reader in his shoes, as he confronted the early crises that helped to shape his character, and also the smaller decisions that helped to create his reputation: What should I write about today? Which word comes next?

Q. So for you the story of Dickens’ rise is one of contingency, and you show us just how tenuous his early years must have felt. How do you think that power of contingency manifested itself in Dickens’ plots? And should our new awareness of its role in his life change the way that we read him?

Critics have long been aware of the pressures created by Dickens’s chosen mode of serial publication – a monthly or weekly narrative rhythm that meant each novel remained invitingly open-ended until the final sentence was hammered into place. Inevitably this has led to two rival ways of reading him, one of which stresses his powers of organisation while the other observes that his writing revels in muddle and mess. Both are true. If Dickens sometimes enjoyed thinking of himself as a weaver at a loom, there was also a good deal of fellow-feeling in his description of a lunatic asylum inmate who was busy studying a piece of matting and trying to find a pattern in its fibres.

Auctioning Jane

Manuscript pages from Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons sold at auction yesterday to the Bodleian library at Oxford for nearly one million pounds. To understand why these pages are so significant, we contacted Robert Morrison with a few questions. Morrison is Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and the editor of our annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, forthcoming this fall.

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Q: Little survives of Austen’s manuscripts, and it’s unlikely that more will turn up. What has this scarcity meant for scholars studying Austen?

It has certainly meant that we prize the manuscripts that do exist. Manuscripts provide a unique opportunity for us to watch a writer’s mind in motion. Anyone who reads or studies Austen is bound to wonder how she put those sentences together. Where did it come from? How did she do it? The Watsons manuscript is fascinating to me not just because of what Austen wrote, but because of what she crossed out.

It is the same with the manuscript from Persuasion that I worked on when preparing the annotated edition for HUP. [A page of the manuscript is pictured at right.] Austen originally concluded Persuasion in July 1816, but three weeks later she cancelled the final two chapters and replaced them with the last three chapters of the published novel. The two cancelled chapters are the only section from any of her published novels to have survived in manuscript, and they offer highly illuminating evidence of her methods of composition and revision.

Austen’s prose can seem effortless. The manuscripts from The Watsons and Persuasion remind us how hard she worked at writing well.

Q: It’s speculated that Austen abandoned The Watsons because its plot began to run uncomfortably parallel to her own life. What do you make of that?

I think such speculations are accurate, though I don’t think they tell the whole story. Austen seems to have stopped working on the manuscript shortly before the invalid Mr. Watson was to die. This seems very likely to have been because at roughly the same moment in her own life her father died, and she could not describe Mr. Watson’s death without bringing fully into view her own father’s death. This cut too close to the bone, and so she put the manuscript down.

Why, however, did she not go back to the novel in later years, when the pain of her father’s death had receded? I think the answer is because she could see clearly how difficult it would be to find a satisfactory resolution to her plot. The thing that always strikes me on reading The Watsons is how grim it all is. There are a few flashes of light, and a great number of shadows. The novel possesses very little of the wit and irony that shapes her published work. If Austen could have seen a way forward, I think she would have pursued it. But the manuscript was too heavy and too cheerless. One of the reasons The Watsons is so fascinating is that it is the start of the most autobiographical novel Austen ever wrote, and it throws searching light on the difference between her life and her art.

Q: These pages from The Watsons sold for nearly one million pounds, about three times more than what was expected. Are you surprised at all by that number? What does it signal for you about Austen’s continued appeal?

From one perspective, that is an astonishing number. But from another it really seems hardly surprising. We have lots of Wordsworth manuscripts, lots of Keats manuscripts, lots of Lawrence manuscripts, lots of Woolf manuscripts. One of the reasons the price is so high is that there is no manuscript material related to Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, or Emma. So when an Austen manuscript—even from an unpublished and incomplete novel—comes on the market, it is bound to attract lots of attention.

But more than this, Austen’s cultural currency is very high and it continues to climb. For many people, her novels shape everything from what we think the past might have been like (it wasn’t, by the way) to what we mean when we say we have “fallen in love.” Thanks especially to movie versions of her books, to “fall in love” today still means in many ways to fall in love like Elizabeth and Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, or—for me—like Anne and Wentworth from Persuasion, which I think is Austen’s greatest novel, and certainly her most modern and compelling love story. From this perspective, one million pounds for an Austen manuscript seems a bargain!

Becoming Hemingway

Fifty years ago this week Ernest Hemingway shot himself dead in his Idaho home. Though parodied often (and as recently as in Woody Allen’s new Midnight in Paris), there’s no debating the impact of Hemingway’s outsize personality and distinctive prose. Below, in an essay from our New Literary History of America, the author Keith Taylor considers Hemingway’s style and its roots.

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Hemingway’s Paradise, Hemingway’s Prose

Keith Taylor

By 1943, just three years after the enormous success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway was already an iconic figure, as much a captive of his public image as he was its creator. The war in Europe was not his war, despite his slightly comic, albeit officially sanctioned efforts to turn his fishing boat, the Pilar, into a submarine destroyer for hunting German U-boats off the coast of Cuba. His third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was taken more seriously as a war correspondent than the forty-four-year-old novelist could hope to be until he got back to Europe. She would soon leave him. While thanking his sister Ursula for her birthday greetings that year, he said he remembered “the smell of cedars” in the northern forest, but he knew he couldn’t return to the idyllic place in his memory.

“Windemere,” with all its connections to the romantic poets and their English Lake District, was the name of the family cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. Dr. Clarence Hemingway bought the land in 1899, the same year his first son was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Every summer the mother and children would leave Oak Park as soon as school was out, head north by steamer to Harbor Springs, Michigan, then take a train to the village of Walloon Lake, where a boat would run them the several miles down the lake to their cottage. The family would stay as long as they could before heading back to their suburban life and the confines of school and winter. Hemingway spent every summer of his childhood at Walloon Lake, learning to hunt and fish, first from his father and then from the children of the local native people who still lived in “Indian camps” around the lakes, usually working as barkpeelers for the logging businesses or as day laborers for the new group of upper-middle-class “summer people” who, like the Hemingways, were beginning to buy up the land. Although that northern landscape had been devastated by loggers in the previous generation and by the fires that had burned through the slash left behind, for Hemingway it became an Edenic image, wild and free from parental or institutional control, that would recur in his work throughout his writing life. It was there that he learned to be confident in the natural world, where he learned the specific names for plants and animals, and where he learned about the relationships between them. After being severely wounded while serving as an ambulance driver attached to the Italian army during World War I, Hemingway returned to northern Michigan to recover, and he was married there to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1921. He left shortly after and never returned, most likely because of ongoing disagreements with his mother and his uncomfortable relationship with his increasingly fragile father. It is also likely that he didn’t want the altered environment to sully his childhood memory of the place that became central to his first stories.

He wrote most of those early stories about the northern forest while living in Paris; they would become part of the collection In Our Time, as published in 1925. While working on them, Hemingway developed the prose style that he would use for the rest of his life, a style that would be much parodied, yet would remake the expectations for English prose for the rest of that century. The declarative directness of the sentences Hemingway was using was certainly influenced by his early stints as a journalist and by his childhood education in the importance of the specifics of nature, but his real discovery came from combining the partial examples of several major modernist figures into a style that a general audience was now ready to accept. From Sherwood Anderson he learned the power of a simple unadorned sentence. Gertrude Stein provided the example of repetition and parallel construction, although, unlike Stein, Hemingway would never push those techniques toward pure sound and away from their connections to character and narrative. From Ezra Pound he learned a larger sense of the music words could make, received a lesson in the rigor of the written arts, and internalized Pound’s dictum that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” From Ford Madox Ford—for whom the young Hemingway worked at the Transatlantic Review, a small literary journal then published in Paris—he absorbed the Flaubertian demand for le mot juste, the almost mystical belief that the perfect word could be found for any particular situation.

Who Was Walter Benjamin in 1910?

How best to describe Walter Benjamin? Philosopher? German-Jewish Intellectual? Marxist? Moralist? Critic (as argued by Daniel Bell when we began to publish Benjamin’s work)?

Benjamin was all of those things and more, of course. Much of his reputation is based on his writings of the ’20s and ’30s, when he produced works like his best-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” But where did that Benjamin come from? How did he develop? Who was he as a young man? Our latest Benjamin volume, Early Writings, 1910-1917, shows that, even at 18, Benjamin was already Benjamin.

A quick digression: this fall we’re publishing Becoming Dickens, a new bio of Dickens that looks just at the first half of his life, with a particular focus on the pivotal years of 1833-1838. That book lays bare all of the contingency of becoming, with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst showing that the man who became Dickens actually nearly didn’t. As origin stories go, Benjamin’s is strikingly different. The early writings in this new volume make especially clear the philosophical foundations on which Benjamin never stopped building—the concern with the role of the present in historical remembrance, the concern with truth in the work of art, and the anxiety over language’s mediation of life.

Benjamin was heavily involved with the German Youth Movement in the years before WWI, and much of the writing in this volume reflects that association. Howard Eiland, the editor and translator of this volume and others, including The Arcades Project, notes that these zealous youth- and education-focused writings clearly reflect what we know of the adult Benjamin:

In these polemical writings, exhorting the sons and daughters of the German middle class to “awaken,” we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The pieces are concerned with matters ranging from the spiritually fruitful appropriation of history to the intellectual relevance of Romanticism in particular, from the theory of education to the idea of experience and the idea of love. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the Twenties and Thirties are already in evidence here.

Of the forty-five pieces in this volume, over thirty are presented here in English for the first time. Many are articles that were published by Benjamin in various outlets; others were never published in any language in his lifetime. The works fall into four principal subject areas: personal writing (poetry, fiction, diary); education and its reform; youth (with essays on love and eroticism); and literary subjects. These early writings lack some of the polish of his later work, and also absent are the sociological perspectives and montage techniques that Benjamin wouldn’t develop until his freelance writing days after his student years. But, as Adam Kirsch notes, through these seven years one can see Benjamin develop “from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker.”

We’ll just end here with a snippet of the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”:

What does language communicate? It communicates the spiritual essence corresponding to it. It is fundamental to recognize that this spiritual essence communicates itself in language and not through it. Hence, there is no speaker of languages, if that means someone who communicates through these languages. Spiritual being communicates itself in, not through, a language: this is to say, it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is communicable. What is communicable in a spiritual entity is its linguistic being. Language, therefore, in each case communicates the linguistic being of things, but their spiritual being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is communicable.  

As this short excerpt makes clear, one other notable Benjaminism was already well-developed in his youth: his –abilities.