2 - Romanticism Against Consciousness

Summary

Romanticism and Consciousness, published in 1970, marked a crucial intervention in Romantic studies, one of the most important in the history of the field. At a time when most English departments, at least in the US, remained in thrall to the New Criticism, Romanticism and Consciousness presented a number of ways to begin moving, as one of its contributors had put it a few years previously, ‘beyond formalism’ (Hartman, ‘Beyond’). The volume's collective act of provocation began with its very title. For decades, critical surveys of Romanticism had clustered around terms associated with the key notion of the individual: the Romantic self (and its extreme forms in the Wordsworthian solitary and the Byronic hero); Romantic subjectivity; and the ‘I’ and its attendant genres, including lyric and its ‘greater Romantic’ variant, the conversation poem (not a conversation at all but an other-directed monologue), the verse autobiography, and the psychologized – or the ‘internalized’– quest romance (Abrams, Bloom). This is not to mention the ‘Romantic Mind,’ transcendent, asocial, autonomous, and, often as not, brooding.

The leading term ‘consciousness’ offered a way forward. It resonated with a number of the intellectual traditions that – in a loose and inherently uneasy coalition – would underwrite the project of poststructuralism soon to emerge. Hegelian philosophy (which threw the notion of psychic autonomy into crisis) and its various progeny in Marxist theory, structuralist analysis with its turn to language as a sort of collectivized subjectivity, and of course the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and his fractious heirs, from Klein to Lacan, all suggested ways simultaneously to resituate and destabilize the Romantic mind, and all contributed toward a novel critical emphasis on consciousness. Like so many Romanticists of my generation, I returned as a student again and again to Romanticism and Consciousness in seeking the terms that would allow my own work to move forward, and my Ph.D. dissertation (later my first book), on ‘verse drama and consciousness in the Romantic age,’ drew direct inspiration from the post-formalist approaches it represented (Richardson, Mental).

And yet the essay that did the most for my own thinking might seem to have taken a contrarian stance in relation to the collection as a whole. Geoffrey Hartman's ‘Romanticism and “Anti-Self-Consciousness,”’ rather than viewing consciousness primarily as a resource for Romantic-era writers (and their revisionary academic expositors), saw consciousness instead as a ‘burden,’ even (quoting Wordsworth) as a ‘strong disease’ (47, 53).