Future directions for Robert Browning studies: a virtual roundtable.

Gibson, Mary Ellis ; Martens, Britta

In the spring of 2011 Britta and Mary Ellis invited a number of scholars of Victorian poetry to engage in an email exchange directed to the future of Browning studies. Five scholars from three continents agreed to weigh in and over the summer of 2011 engaged in a lively discussion of various questions posed by way of provocation--rather than steady conviction--by the editors. Here is a lightly edited version of the colloquy, prefaced by our original letter to the participants.

March 24, 2011

Dear Isobel Armstrong, Sandra Donaldson, Warwick Slinn, Herbert Tucker, and John Woolford:

We are editing the special issue of Victorian Poetry commemorating the bicentenary of Robert Browning's birth. We would be most grateful for your help. At the most recent North American Victorian Studies Association meeting (Fall, 2010) aside from Chip Tucker's keynote address, only one paper on Robert Browning appeared on the program. Similarly, the British Association for Victorian Studies conferences over the past six years have never featured more than two papers on Robert Browning, and sometimes none at all. In light of this fact, we ask ourselves what might be the future of Robert Browning studies?

It might be fun, we thought, to create a roundtable exchange of brief reflections. To get the ball rolling, we've suggested a few questions, but you may have questions of your own instead, and there is no need for each person to address them all.

Here are our provocations. Feel free to suggest your own questions or to critique these.

1. Is there a future for Robert Browning studies at a time when cultural studies and a focus on material culture dominate Victorian studies?

2. Many articles published of late are formulated along the lines of

"Robert Browning and ..."; writers often engage in passing, en route to larger cultural or thematic ends. What happens to Browning studies if few critics have a deep/broad engagement with his work? From a slightly different angle, could we say there are Joyceans and Dickensians by the score, and there is a critical presumption that serious scholars are familiar with the whole oeuvre of these writers. Can that be said of Browning studies now? Will it be sayable in the future?

3. Related to the previous question: is a single author study on a poet publishable these days?

4. How is Browning teachable in the twenty-first century?

5. What's the point of studying someone who, to quote Catherine Hall, was "white, male and middle-class" in a time when the canon has, at least in theory, radically expanded?

6. What opportunities do you envision for Robert Browning studies in the next 200 years?

We would be most grateful if you would be willing to participate in this exchange. We value your ideas, your suggestions, and your opinions. We look forward to hearing from you.

All best wishes, Mary Ellis Gibson and Britta Martens

From: Warwick Slinn

Professor Emeritus and Honorary Research Fellow

Massey University, New Zealand

April 14, 2011

Dear fellow e-roundtablers,

Thanks to Britta and Mary Ellis for initiating this exchange. It looks as if I might as well open the batting.

Response to question 1

One of the sharper consequences for literary scholars in the context of cultural studies and a material focus is the disappearance of the single literary artifact as an object of study. Given that in rejecting the political assumptions of new criticism, we've agreed that poems are not objects that should be isolated from their historical connections, the need to restore works to their material contexts is understandable. At the same time I think there are a couple of particular challenges that affect Robert Browning studies. The first is to distinguish between, on the one hand, ideological underpinnings whereby literary works are only of value when they can be subsumed as propaganda in some sort of contemporary cultural war, and, on the other, efforts to explain the critical function of a work itself (its ability to critique its society). I propose a dose of Arnoldian disinterest in order to reject the first and pursue the second. The second challenge is concomitant but more demanding: analyzing literary function within a cultural context, studying the literary artifact as a nexus for a shifting array of discursive forces. Although not a straightforward task, this analysis is made possible by the conceptual work of the last three decades. Approaching Browning in relation to broader cultural issues is not a problem (more likely it's essential to the study of his cultural significance; see question 2), but failing to respond to these particular challenges allows cultural agendas to override literary ones.

All efforts may flounder, of course, in a contemporary culture that is downplaying the value of the individual reading experience (and perhaps that ultimately is what is at stake), and if attending to individual poems means a return to the methodological past (new critical formalism, paraphrases of authorial belief, evaluation studies), that will confirm cultural critics in the view that literary studies is indulgent, self-enclosed and effete. Alternatively, Browning scholars might heed Donald Hair's suggestion that Browning's offering of suggestions and puzzles and enigmas makes him a poet for the twenty-first century; they can continue to explain how Browning welcomes indeterminacy and regards the making of meaning as the defining human activity. (1) There is the added bonus of Browning's development of the dramatic monologue--a brilliant cultural act that deserves continuing attention. As, for example, interest in consciousness and the nature of selfhood shifts to the realms of evolutionary criticism and cognitive psychology, Browning's poetry remains a rich cultural source for the dramatizations of human self-construction, rhetorical manipulation and verbally-based perception. Cognitive theorists are coming to see the self as a dynamic process where language acts are fundamental, where Self Comes to Mind (Damasio) and humankind is The Symbolic Species (Deacon), but Browning's monologues already show that. So as humanities scholars start to examine the role of culture in human evolution, Browning's role as a supreme dramatist of discursive action in human speech ("The thoughts which give the act significance," Red Cotton Night-Cap Country) ought to remain seminal.

All best,

Warwick

From: Isobel Armstrong

Emeritus Professor, Birkbeck College, University of London

Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London

May 2, 2011

1. I began to re-read some Browning poems, particularly the late poems, in Daniel Karlin's excellent Penguin edition in order to think about the conversation we will be having. I was struck all over again by the restlessness and awkwardness of his writing, poetry that turns awkwardness into virtuosity--never has awkwardness been so memorable and surprising. But that does make him such a difficult poet. And in a climate where individual reading experience, and the act of close reading in particular, is down-played, as Warwick points out, that makes Browning resistant to critical appraisal. He is a poet who raises strong feelings of antipathy as Tennyson does not--remember Bagehot's disgust, associating his poetry with the rank smell of blood. Browning has been unlucky, too, as critical attention has swung to gender (his wife has eclipsed him) and to the fin de siecle. The current concerns with affect and the emotions do not seem to have encompassed Browning's affect, but more the kernel of elegy that lives at the heart of almost any Tennyson poem. So it is not wholly the powerful influence of studies in material culture that has displaced Browning, but more the convergence of a whole number of factors.

Warwick Slinn, citing Damasio and Deacon, suggests that cognitive theory and performative accounts of the speech act as self in process might renew the epistemological grounding of Browning's poetry. I am sure that is true. Robert Langbaum re-invented Browning as modernist relativist, invoking Nietzsche (1957), and Herbert Tucker did this again for post modernism, invoking Derrida (1980). It's true that another conceptual spurt is due. But there are other avenues to be taken. John Woolford's original and productive work on Browning the revisionary (1988) could be extended. Sally Bushell's philosophical reading of revision (2009) has opened many further possibilities in "revision studies." And there is the question of nineteenth-century readers' own annotations (which are in a sense revisionary acts) of Browning poems raised by Andrew Stauffer's recent work on readers' annotations of Hemans. Daniel Karlin's brilliant and prescient study of Browning's hatreds (1993) could again be built upon through the work on affect theory and the history of the emotions that I have already mentioned. I could see Browning featuring in a history of the "grotesque" and its affect in the nineteenth century, for instance. Samantha Matthews' innovative work on the culture of death in the nineteenth century (2004) suggests yet another way of taking forward the cultural history of the emotions.

But when all is said and done I don't think the concentration on material culture or the "Browning and ..." genre of discussion is a problem if it is really exciting. The problem with many such researches is that they are frequently dull and often make one forget about the poetry and poetic language. My own way back into Browning in Victorian Glassworlds (2008) was through optical culture, when I was dazzled by the way he built new technological and optical media (the caloptype, the zoetrope) into the very heart and structure of his poetry: "Childe Roland" sprang into new meaning for me--well beyond the space I had to discuss the poem. I think the idea that Browning "invented" the dramatic monologue (he didn't) is a turnoff. The so-called dramatic monologue is an infinitely variable form. Behind the monologue he explored is his interest in a many-times mediated world, from the virtual image to the celebrity, which was emerging in the nineteenth century. This interest was not simply a matter of superficial "topical" references to newspapers, the photograph, and spectacle: he saw that new forms of mediation shape the language and the form of culture in a dynamic way, and his poems exemplify this new mediation in their structure and poetic speech acts. I guess I am asking for a truly Benjaminian Browning as well as the Nietzschean and Derridean Brownings that still have purchase for me.

Finally, I think that a healthy Browning studies means looking at a history beyond that of the poet himself. Browning was sharply and often excruciatingly aware of violence in many contexts. Pippa Passes must be one of the earliest poems to take terrorism as one of its themes. An account of Browning and violence that moves up to W. B. Yeats and Paul Celan would place Browning in an important history that includes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in its scope.

2. I think it is a good thing to have Browning specialists and Browning generalists. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin have shown through their editorial work for the Longman edition the enormous possibilities in Browning's work. There are critics who know the oeuvre--those mentioned as participants in this symposium, for example. But beside being dedicated Browning scholars, Woolford is as much a Tennyson scholar as a Browning scholar, and Karlin has published on Proust as well as Browning.

3. A single-author study of Browning would only be unacceptable if it were dull--think how exciting Cornelia Pearsall's single-author study of Tennyson is (2008). I think there is still potential for an in-depth reading of Men and Women and Dramatis Personae. With the new scholarly information released by the Longman edition, and greater knowledge of Browning's reading in particular, a far richer understanding of these works than has been possible up to now is available.

4. Of course he is teachable, through the love poems, through the ambitions of The Ring and the Book, through his fascination with modern forms of mediation. I think that electronic data on the global spread of his works is also a way of teaching Browning--how poems end up in America and India, often pirated by newspapers. The history of the book is another: students can hunt up and look physically at the many editions of Browning in his lifetime. The controversy over these editions and the form of a copy text is also a way of teaching textual studies in Browning. I guess I am happiest with forms of teaching that keep us centered on the poetics of the poems, but I don't see that this cannot be a part of all the methods I have suggested.

5. Well, I'm not happy with the forms of gender, class and post-colonial critique that turn into accusatory history. We are still working on more subtle readings of these categories. Browning was intensely aware of all these categories: the letters indicate his political anxieties. And after all, his first major collection was called Men and Women. He was acutely aware of the Risorgimento, he understood colonial exploitation--note the casual way the speaker in "Clive" accepts conquest in India: Clive "Conquered and annexed and Englished!" (1.9)

6. Give us a break twenty years will do--the opportunities could be depressing if digital studies doesn't find a way of discovering some intellectual components in its agenda. Moretti-style book counts and averages could be sterile. I am fairly optimistic about print culture, though. It's unlikely we can do without it, though it may take forms we don't expect.

Isobel

From: Sandra Donaldson

Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor

University of North Dakota

May 4, 2011

Dear Roundtablers,

I've had mixed feelings about being part of this conversation and declared my hesitancy to Britta and Mary Ellis. The hesitancy springs from reading the small number of Browning critics and commentators, none of whom are likely to ever read this, who make their points about Robert and his work by demeaning Elizabeth and hers. The Book, The Ring, and the Poet was my earliest exposure to this approach in its most blatant form. (2) Surely that book and others like it (see Harold Bloom's vitriolic introduction to his selection of essays by the wonderful critics he nevertheless uses in his Chelsea House volume of essays on EBB) have an influence on the conception of her work by students and scholars and, by association, an influence on how Robert's work is seen.

To bring this confession around to the questions posed, it may be that those of us who were blown away when we first read Aurora Leigh were shocked as we read more about both poets and observed the sins of omission and commission of numerous twentieth-century critics. Having been introduced to Robert's work early in my reading life, I've always loved it, and I wonder if The Ring and the Book may be as important to our thinking in the late nineteenth and through the twentieth centuries as Paradise Lost has been since the seventeenth. And since I'm in hyperbolic mode, Aurora Leigh may be that work for the twenty-first. These three long poems in their subject and style both require a commitment to reading, literally. As Isobel suggests, referring to Warwick regarding cognitive theory and performative accounts of the speech act as self in process, it may be that the effect of that experience of needing to just sit down and spend the time is a mind-changing experience (or to bring back a lovely '70s term, mind-bending?). As students we may have been assigned to read the work, but in doing so we become deeply engaged by it.

I came to Aurora Leigh late (and with resistance, I have to admit), following coursework through to a doctoral program in the '70s that rarely included anything by EBB other than the Sonnets, or that one sonnet. My academic trajectory has not been to reject Browning as I've embraced EBB, but to want to think more about connections between and among their works. I'm especially interested in the intellectual courtship aspect of their letters to one another.

Sandra

Isobel Armstrong replies to Sandra Donaldson:

May 5, 2011

I concur, particularly with your last paragraph--to see EBB and Browning together must be the way to re-start new readings. And you are right about both The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh. I guess what we need to do collectively now is to think through some ways into these two great poems.

Isobel

From: Professor John Woolford

Honorary Research Fellow

The School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics

The University of Sheffield

May 5, 2011

A somewhat different angle on the Brownings

Dear All,

Here is my initial response to the questions posed by our ringmasters. You should bear in mind that these are the thoughts of a fairly unreconstructed Cambridge School adherent!

1. Is there a future for Robert Browning studies? I don't see any problem. Browning was profoundly engaged with the materiality of Victorian culture. In particular, his notion of the poetic text takes in its material status, most obviously in the epistolary "Cleon" and "Karshish," most spectacularly in A Death in the Desert's replication of the fragile character of ancient documents, and affiliation of this to the indeterminacies of Victorian religious debate. His engagement with Sensation fiction in the 1870s, in particularly Red Cotton Night-Cap Country and The Inn Album, remains to be properly explored; I myself am specifically intrigued by his evolution of notions of 'Providence', especially in The Ring and the Book, in the context of parallel explorations by Dickens in Little Dorrit and Collins in Armadale (and of course the malign instrumentality of biological determinism in e.g. Zola, Ibsen; and what might be termed "paranoid Providence" in the novels of Hardy, and the extension of that into the twentieth century in the work of e.g. Kafka and Pynchon).

2. Not sure of the force of this question about scholarship on the whole of Browning's oeuvre. I haven't noticed any onset of ignorance, willed or otherwise, of Browning in recent Victorian studies. Of course there are more Joyceans and Dickensians than Browningians, but when has that not been the case? Fact: Browning is not, nor has ever been, popular in the sense that even Tennyson is. We all know this. And seek to change the situation by establishing the grounds on which Browning infiltrates his Victorian context in ways that are of enduring interest. I myself must admit to having encouraged research students to work on "Browning and Wordsworth" (published under that title by John Baker), "Browning and Arnold" (that one uncompleted), "Browning and Blake" (completed; being revised for publication by William Goldman). Of course, such pairings could be regarded as simple extensions or reduplications of the single-author preoccupation (especially given Arnold's commendation of them); but another form of the "Browning and ..." formula, Viscusi's "'The Englishman in Italy': Free Trade as a Principle of Aesthetics" indicates the job still to be done on the exactitudes and indeterminacies of Browning's politics. I've published freely on this subject, but there's undoubtedly more to be said, e.g. in the context of the contesting of the term "liberal" between economic and social models, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

3. Is a single author study on a poet publishable these days? Surely: the continuing popularity of biography points to the fact that a specific individual furnishes a useful, probably unmatched, entry-point into the socio-cultural formation(s) of his/her time.

4. Being retired, I can't say from direct experience how Browning is now teachable, but the twenty-first century doesn't seem to me, from the strictly pedagogical point of view, any different from the twentieth, when in my experience many of the best undergraduates became very excited by Browning's enormous force and proto-modernist strangeness, even though the difficulty associated with that could put off weaker ones. The problem has always been the fact that the "Browning flavor" only really emerges in works of considerable length, such as "Childe Roland" or "Caliban" (not to mention the virtually unteachable Sordello and The Ring and the Book!); but those and similar poems are obviously rich enough as entry-texts into issues of subject-positioning, self-manufacture, the aesthetics/poetics of egotism, misogyny, cruelty, obsession-compulsion, paranoia, psychosis, and other, less extreme mental states studied by Browning.

5. Well of course Browning's racial (and class) origins were a subject of wide speculation in his later life (as EBB's have been in some recent studies); but seriously, it remains the case that some kind of aesthetic criterion has to regulate "the canon," however constituted. People in general read literature because they like it, and although Browning's aesthetic character has frequently been contested, its unorthodox power has hitherto always prevailed.

6. As Isobel says, 200 is a bit of a stretch, but in the next 20 years the Brownings' Correspondence should be complete, as well as the Oxford and (God willing!) Longman editions; and the Baylor Browning guide may supplement its resources. So there should be a sound scholarly basis for the unfettered development of critical appraisal of Browning and his fit to his time. It's hard to predict the drift of academic fashions even in that time-span, but Browning has weathered those of the last 50 years, as Isobel details, and so should be in a position to jump any future hurdles.

Regards, John

From: Isobel Armstrong

May 6, 2011

Re: A Somewhat Different Angle on the Brownings

Ah but isn't Browning challenging you as reader about the very nature of "redundancy"? Challenging us in a Barthesian way to refuse the idea of the "core" meaning wrapped in disposable discursive elements? To some extent Aurora Leigh is doing the same thing. Casa Guidi is a different animal though I do love it.

Isobel

From: John Woolford

6 May 2011

Dear Isobel,

Yes, that is the question, is it not? I've never actually thought of The Ring and the Book as Browning's masterpiece, though it looms pretty large, of course: the redundancies of its scheme don't for me fade away till book 11, which seems to me perhaps his most finished piece of writing--against the grain, of course--and the most powerful description/discussion of the social compromise I know. And I prefer Casa Guidi Windows as a poem to Aurora Leigh. However, a display of preference is not what's wanted, and I'll ponder the question while awaiting other responses.

John

From: Herbert Tucker

John C. Colman Professor of English

University of Virginia

May 9, 2011

Dear Companions,

Coming to the round table this late makes me a parasite, I confess, on the calories several of you have already set forth. Because others have largely spoken my mind on several of the questions our Victorian Poetry hosts laid out, I can weigh in pretty light on those, as I'll do infra. But while I have your attention up here, let me ask whether there's not fertile common ground between what Warwick calls the "dramatic" ("the dramatizations of human self-construction, rhetorical manipulation and verbally-based perception" and "Browning's role as a supreme dramatist of discursive action in human speech") and what Isobel calls the "mediated": Browning "saw that new forms of mediation shape the language and the form of culture in a dynamic way and his poems exemplify this new mediation in their structure and poetic speech acts."

I ask from a belief that, somewhere between 20 and 200 years from now, what we now know as literary studies will have been absorbed by, or have grown into, the morphed offshoots of what we now know as media studies. (A long generation ago I was saying the same about comparative literature, mind you, so I have no record as an academic prophet to stand on.) If, by some not very drastic or complicated adjustment, the descriptions and analytic arguments that a number of us learned to couch dramatistically (Kenneth Burke's phrase) can be restated in terms of mediation, then Browning may earn honorable mention in emergent cultural histories. A (re)mediated Browning should prove perennially resourceful, too, as a proving ground for theories about cultural objects--a monitor, I like to think, reminding the future that such objects are produced by, if they aren't indeed in their objectivity illusory byproducts of, what Warwick and Isobel supra call "action" and "acts." I'm not sure that the "speech" to which both Warwick and Isobel refer will survive as more than accidental historical markers of Browning's nineteenth-century moment; I myself can scarcely think beyond it, but I'm prepared to believe that for future generations it may no longer enjoy such cachet. Still, Browning covered a lot of the media waterfront in his day, and his steadfast enlistment of plastic, visual, and performing arts as adjuncts to his own preternatural verbality suggest a remarkable openness to different learning, cognizing, and communicative "styles" that may command heightened respect among our disciplinary descendants.

What I've just written should make clear my agreement with John that question (1) is a non-starter: Browning was already way ahead of the cult-studs and material culture curve. Question (4) strikes me as corollary to (1). They "ought" to find him unusually interesting in the unfolding century. Caveat: they will have to have kept up their own verbal skills in order to keep his pace, take his measure and so appreciate what he has to offer; there is a bar to admittance here, and it's not set very low. Still, for any future I can see there will be a set of verbal high-scorers who can engage, and therefore will relish, Browning's s difficulty. As long as avant-gardism confers intellectual distinction, and you may take that in Bourdieuvian sense if you like, there will be readers out there proud to call Browning their own. Those were the terms of reception he had more or less settled for by the 1850s anyhow, when he set about in earnest to create the legacy taste whereby he would be enjoyed. If just now the prestige of vanguardism has jumped up towards the Aesthetes and 1890s writers, and left Browning temporarily a bit darkling, never fear. Virtually all the PRB and their flashy successors knew how important Browning was, and said so unmistakably; so the road back to Browning won't be hard to find when new curiosities arise. (I myself found it through Modernist poetics, much the same way.)

Question (2). For "Browning and ..." the sister media are a growth field. I'd add to Isobel's compelling nomination of Affect and Violence a couple more, for the shorter term at least: "... and Religion" and "... and Liberalism," though John's "Politics" may be the better, ampler term. Complementary impediments attend each of these two. The former has a long and pretty dismal paper trail littered with the seedier, needier hounds of Protestant doctrine, which can create profound discouragement at a certain point along the research chase. But of course Browning, once he's actually read hard, shakes free of those pursuivants, jumps the brook, switches back and is off and running (H. James has a splendid trope for him of just this kind in his great tribute essay); and his own performance of religious ideas is a very refreshing exercise. The latter topic, Liberalism, has had not too much attention but too little, Viscusi's fine prompt notwithstanding; and the Victorianist reassessors of Liberalism seem devoted to keeping not just Browning but poets tout court out of the discussion.

Question (2) asks also, if I've understood it, what will become of the Browning oeuvre. I'm composing these remarks 4 blocks from the Armstrong Browning Library, a place that should in itself see to it that custody of the whole oeuvre doesn't go wholly neglected. A succession of curators will arise. A more interesting subquestion for me is what in practice the functioning Browning canon of future decades will be. What are the titles to which in polite academic discourse one may in future allude more or less confidently? A handful of lyrics and dramatic monologues is about the size of it right now, and I don't expect that canon to get much bigger. What do the rest of you say that "Browning literacy" should consist in? How often does the world need reminding that Pippa Passes and The Ring and the Book are remarkable experiments, whose radical procedural conceptions should be common knowledge even if they don't get closely studied by many?

(3) Yes, single-author monographs will continue to be written, published, and profited from. Whether they will become bound books is another question well beyond our purview.

(5) Dead Bourgeois White Straight Male Alert. At some point--and there must be places in the anglophone world that have reached this point, mustn't there?--the gravitational centrality of that cultural phenotype will have been sufficiently dissipated that it will reacquire interest on new terms, shaping up as an odd aberration worthy at the very least of historical study. At that point the Victorian hegemony of the DBWSM will no longer be an axiom, it will be a problem inviting definition. If we don't get to that point fairly soon, there will unfortunately be more serious issues engrossing our successors than the state of Browning scholarship.

Chip

From: Warwick Slinn

May 11, 2011

Dear colleagues in companionship (I'm sure we can ring these changes a while longer),

While there's a brief lull I thought I'd add a few remarks while in transit. Naturally I admire Chip's reconciliation of my dramatic with Isobel's mediated, and certainly I would have wanted to argue that what I'd subsume under the heading of dramatic action (or linguistic action) in Browning's poetry would include mediation, and representation. I see also that Isobel finds generic issues dull, and I'd fully agree if that meant the unsatisfactory debates about definition that has tended to characterize a great deal of dramatic monologue discussion. However, definitions aside, I'd still like to propose the importance of generic implications (in any literary function, but particularly in Browning) and where I'd want to sustain a sense of form, if not quite genre, as movement rather than as fixed product. Insofar as I think we elude formalist elements only with great difficulty, and with negative consequences, in literary studies, let me propose a shift in term to the equally problematic modalities. And I'll propose, I hope provocatively, that the ambiguities of modalities are as significant in Browning's shifting literary formalisms as they are in Mahler's musical ones (you can see where I was heading). I think there's enough evidence in the Abt Vogler and Galuppi monologues to suggest that Browning would have been sympathetic to the idea. But this isn't the place to argue that and it's all a punt for the future.

Another thought. Basically I understand us to be answering the question: Why Robert Browning? I've been hovering around the same question for Mahler in his centenary year (there's even a book with that title), and for most of us the tendency, as shown by our responses here and correctly I think, is to move towards cultural and historical value, what has been contributed to the aesthetics of the discipline, or to human satisfaction (I'm shying away from pleasure) and understanding. But I'm also forced by some of my more inquisitorial friends to come back to the same basic premise--the value of the immediate reading (listening) experience. There's a risk that this is just another critical cliche, but it's significant that most of you have also taken that up. Isobel's reference to the virtuosity of Browning's awkwardness is salutary I think and underpins many of the obstacles that surround the "why Browning" question. My experience when teaching, like John's, was that Browning is eminently teachable--students even become enthralled by the longer poems, including The Ring and the Book, when given the opportunity to absorb them with some explanatory hints, but for most students he does, I suspect, need to be taught, if only to assist in overcoming that initial resistance. So there's a challenge for our successors.

Warwick

From: Mary Ellis Gibson

Co-editor

Dear Browning Roundtablers,

What fun Britta and I have had following your conversation. Just last week Chip wrote me to ask, among other things, whether we'd fallen away from this discussion or were finding the energy to return. I'm hoping that we've all now written enough evaluative prose about our students (marking, double marking, dissertation / thesis reading) or enjoyed enough June strawberries and cream (or Mahler and pastry mit schlag) that a little further conversation might be possible?

To that end, I've excerpted some of my favorite bits--observations, ideas, questions--from the conversation to date (and no doubt each of you has a different set of questions, provocations, and observations). [These excerpts are of course omitted here.]

To my mind (but then I wrote a book on Pound), questions seem to be emerging about mediation, about what Warwick calls "modalities" (as opposed to the more prescriptive--sometimes--or restrictive idea of genre), about the long poem itself and how it can be rethought, approached, questioned. I also hear questions, to put it simply, about which nineteenth-century long poems one might want to value / reread / write about / or teach. To put it more complexly I hear questions about how we attend to the experimental heft, ambiguities and challenges of Browning's long poems and how we read larger cultural and political preoccupations in the process. And there's the question of shifting literacies and the nature / future of reading / viewing or "remediation."

Best,

Mary Ellis

From: Warwick Slinn

June 26, 2011

We don't seem to be responding very quickly to Mary Ellis's urging of more engagement, so here are a few further thoughts. I hope, Mary and Britta, that notwithstanding the admirable extraction of points made so far, you won't lose sight of some of the other many valuable comments, particularly from Chip and Isobel in response to the list of questions that were proposed earlier.

There are many suggestions there that might well provoke thoughts in any future Browning campaign, or about his status and achievement at the time of his bicentenary. I particularly liked (we'll all have our favorites) Chip's speculation about the inflections of speech in future studies and whether Browning's interest in a range of media (plastic, visual, aural) along with his preternatural verbality might still attract the interest of future students. For me, Browning's daily existence as a supremely verbal person (living at the vortex of a semiotic world, perceiving and arranging his life through reading, by means of letters, dictionaries, books, newspapers, poems) illustrates (foregrounds) the dominance of a textual culture in European cultural history over the last several hundred years (Gutenberg has a lot to answer for). Whether this dominance peaked in the nineteenth century remains to be seen (and Chip is, rightly I fear, not sanguine about its continuation), but it helps to explain my own sustained sense of the importance of The Ring and the Book as the supremely testing poetic experiment of the century. I've espoused several times its virtues as a work that is dominated by the overwhelming question of how we are to know anything save through "worth of word," through modalities and mediations that are fundamentally to do with the problem of the sign. The range and structure of this work means he explores these processes through a range of both personal and institutional constructions, all of which reach into the fundamental means by which a modern European society and its individual members arranges its world. So in these terms I find no reason to revise my earlier claims in print that The Ring and the Book has an epistemological edge over both Aurora Leigh and The Prelude, my other contenders for the top three long poems in the long nineteenth century.

I would also echo therefore Chip's suggestion that the scholarly world may need reminding about the radical procedural conceptions of both Pippa Passes and The Ring and the Book, and to that list I would add monologues such as "Childe Roland" and "Bishop Blougram" as examples that take readers in two other radical directions for poetry, the first in terms of narrative ambiguity and the second in terms of dialectical discursiveness. But the moment I deploy these semiotic short-hand determinants in favor of sustaining sections of the Browning canon, I'm again aware that Chip's salutary anxiety about future perceptions of textually-dominant art may all too soon loom large.

Some of you may well wish to respond to other aspects of Mary's challenge about long poems and I'll happily look forward to those and to responding further. I'm all for the value of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country and Fifine at the Fair (that's a particularly underestimated Browning poem in my view), but for the moment my thoughts are confined by verbal ambiguities, enigmas and semiotic play controlled by Gutenberg and the nineteenth century! Perhaps aurally-linked shifts, modalities indeed, are the way out, or we just die, like Mahler, leaving a 9-note (but not 12) chord.

Warwick

From: Isobel Armstrong

July 3, 2011

I want to make three discrete points.

The first takes up Chip's view that literary studies will be absorbed into media studies and that Browning will have to survive (or not) in this field. I know that the proliferating ways of reading and writing that have been generated by digital (and social) media have tempted people to characterize these as new literacies that usurp the "old" literacy we represent. But I think we should resist this facile capitulation to an epistemological break--I am suspicious of the idea of the complete break. We are all reading and writing--we need language, language above all, which is the heart of poetry. That's the constant. Browning's innate sense of where his culture was going really makes this an interesting challenge--to see what his poetry looks like in the context of these changes in "literacies."

The second point is brief, about the need to think about Browning's long poems. I don't think this will get off the ground until we think through a taxonomy of the nineteenth-century long poem--from The Prelude, The Botanic Garden, through to the Dynasts, maybe even including The Waste Land and Four Quartets and the Cantos as throwbacks. Chip very usefully revived the epic, and brought whole swathes of writing into visibility. (3) But the long poem goes beyond the epic, as his book recognized. Until we find a way of thinking through the categories of the long poem, of which the epic is one, I don't think it will be easy to write about Browning's.

The third point I want to make is rather more pessimistic. There seems to be an unstoppable rush in criticism at present towards the end of the century under the rubric of the Victorian, but I think because that end of the century feels like pre-modernism. And I guess people feel more comfortable with it. But it has made the mid century and earlier look grey, which is really a bad thing intellectually, historically. This new interest of the fin de siecle seems to be founded in psychologies of the sensoria (and a turning away from politics?). It is worth standing back from things and asking why this interest has arisen just now, and where earlier poets belong to the later period or how their formations are in relation to it. Browning's discomfort with the deliberate interest of the Rossetti group in sensation/sensoria/the senses makes him look an outsider. But a poet who could write of the cool silver shock of water on skin is clearly not ignoring the sensoria. His hermeneutic intensity and highly cerebral sophistication has always been a barrier to reading him. I would like to find a way round this.

Isobel

January 2012

As this bicentenary issue of Victorian Poetry goes to press, I thank all the contributors to the Browning roundtable for their vigorous contestation of our questions and their engaging commentary on the future of Browning studies.

I've especially enjoyed the connections that have emerged here and, even more, the apt descriptions of Browning's texts and his challenges to us as twenty-first-century readers. Browning's cerebral sophistication--the epistemological density of his texts, the intensity with which he dramatizes constructed selves--figures strongly for us as the heart of his work. Yet, moving away from the central concerns we have shared over the years and toward a twenty-first century Browning, this roundtable focuses significant attention on mediation and "remediation."

Two preoccupations have emerged for me from this stimulating discussion.

The first pertains to the issue of mediation itself. We all, it seems to me, are swimming in the digital ocean, attempting to see it whole or at least to analyze our current placement, although we have few accurate ways to map its underwater terrain or assess the velocity of its currents. We engage this effort while learning to breathe under water. Mapping an ocean while swimming in it seems remarkably tricky, for maps are--one might argue paradoxically--as much about time as place. The companions of the digital roundtable envision the map in different ways. Some imagine a digital world populated with enduring readers, and adept ones at that. Some harbor skepticism about the replacement of the printed verbal text with the visual, the aural, or with mixed or perhaps "remediated" media. We anticipate, with varying degrees of optimism and varying doses of pessimism, imagined future readers of Browning's poetry.

In the context of Browning's hermeneutical challenges, what will the future of reading look like? On the one hand, "high scoring" readers (as Chip Tucker calls them), armed with necessary persistence to engage the whole of The Ring and the Book, may come to "remediate" its many redundancies and epistemological challenges. For Browning still challenges us by the very nature of redundancy to abandon the quest for a core of meaning wrapped in discursive prolixity, verbal multiplicity, or what Isobel Armstrong astutely calls the "virtuosity" of his awkwardness. On the other hand, we are cautious; we perhaps should be quite anxious about future perceptions of textually-dominant art. From the Anxiety of Influence and the Map of Misreading, we have moved to anxiety about the print text itself. We have begun to imagine maps of remediation.

Suddenly I think, hmm, Pippa Passes as a graphic novel? Or perhaps a "graphic poem"? Or "Childe Roland" as anime? Would not Browning's poems that are most resistant to such remediation be those most obsessed with print or manuscript textuality? How might one remediate a poem as insistently about its own mediations as "A Death in the Desert"? Or would the poem most resistant to remediation be the text most obsessed with casuistry--say "Bishop Blougram's Apology"?

How, then, might the act of remediation create a different canon of Browning's poetry? What happens when the long poem, or the very long poem in Browning's case, makes its appearance formatted as digital text? If my experience teaching the first edition of In Memoriam via Google Books is any guide, students find e-reading unsatisfactory for long poems, especially unfamiliar poems they are reading for the first time. For them, the arc of the whole disappears in the stream of electrons. Such scanned reproductions aside, I wonder how we might imagine a digital archive that would create an intermediary form between text and reader. One has only to think of the Rossetti Archive as the mediated presence both signaling and enabling a shift in Victorian scholars' attention from the intellectual to the sensorial, and from Browning and Arnold to writers of the fin de siecle. Would a Browning Archive direct our attention the other way?

How curious that a poet so obsessed with parallel arts (poetry and painting, poetry and music) as Browning has not yet found his intermediary--the scholar or team of scholars who would create the Browning Archive. Such mediation might capture both the sensoria in Browning's knotty verse and its intellectual white heat.

A second preoccupation that emerges for me from the roundtable is also related to the anxiety of textuality. It concerns the long poem. The companions of the roundtable insist that long poems are the heart of or even the keys to Browning's oeuvre, the sine qua non of reading Browning. The "Browning flavor," as John Woolford argues, "is best known in his longer works--'Caliban' or 'Childe Roland' at least, but of course Sordello and The Ring and the Book." We have made strong cases here, too, for the crucial place of other long poems, from Pippa Passes to Fifine at the Fair. John neatly calls these poems "works of considerable length." Warwick argues that in general and with regard to the long poem, we need to think hard about genre, its formal dimensions and claims. He suggests modalities as perhaps a stronger term than genre. How, then, Isobel Armstrong asks, do we think formally and conceptually about "works of considerable length"? What new critical language might we invent to describe these poems? What specifications would be more satisfactory than the "long poem"--a baggy nomenclature encompassing everything from The Prelude to Aurora Leigh to the Cantos, from The Maximus Poems to Omeros to A Suitable Boy?

For Browning, the concern with the nature of textuality finds its mode in--or its "genre"--through long poems and experimental forms. For him, more is more, not less. In The Ring and the Book, Browning claimed his fast-multiplying words were more in various epistemological senses. The "old woe" that steps on the stage in Browning's longest poem, is not, he tells us to be "judged by the very sense and sight indeed" but "to wit" by "voices we call evidence"

 Uproar in the echo, live fact deadened down,
 Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away,
 Yet helping us to all we seem to hear:
 For how else know we save by worth of word? (1.834-837) (4)

Browning questions the connections between word and wit. The poem asks what we can know from echoes, whispers, deadened sounds remediating some act, action, agency or motive. Such evidence, Browning claims, helps us to "all we seem to hear." I emphasize "seem." We know--or do we?--by "worth of word."

To know Browning's texts by wit and word, the companions of the round table have sent us in a variety of new directions. They suggest we reread Robert and Elizabeth's "intellectual courtship"; that we redress a depoliticized emphasis on late-century poetics by investigating Browning's attention to the senses, to affect, and to violence; that we attend to what might constitute Browning's liberalism and his religion. The long poems particularly provide fascinating ways into a laundry list of affective or mental states, including those John calls "cruelty, obsession-compulsion, paranoia, psychosis" and their less extreme cousins.

And yet, from these considerations, the roundtable brings us back persistently to the status of the verbal, to the nature of textuality, to the epistemological stakes of language. The poet swims in language. His, John argues, is the consummately verbal world. "How else know we save by worth of word?" is for Browning's critics in his bicentennial year a compelling question. What are words worth? Are more words, in Browning's case, worth more than fewer? If the voices of history "help us to all we seem to hear" what is the status of our hearing, our reading? Do we only seem to hear? And if so, what might that compromised "hearing" or reading mean for historical understanding, moral agency, knowledge, belief?

At the beginning of The Ring and the Book, as at its conclusion, the "mediate word" is perhaps present, perhaps missing (12. 857). But the significant word, surely, is mediated. Or in Browning's metaphor, it is "oblique." To shift, as the poet himself did from verbal to visual metaphors, we might claim that Browning's words are not mediated as in classical point perspective--no "School of Athens" here--but by multiple perspectives contending for simultaneous representation. Perhaps, then, the world as created in Browning's long poems is not so different after all from the highly mediated digital ocean in which his readers now swim.

With warmest thanks to the roundtable,

Mary Ellis

Notes

(1) Donald Hair, with Richard Kennedy, The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2007), p. 416.

(2) William Irvine and Park Honan, The Book, The Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning (London: Bodley Head, 1975).

(3) Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).

(4) The Ring and the Book, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Richard D. Altick (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001).