Full disclosure of an open secret up front: I am not a medical historian. I study, teach, and write about literature and culture, spending the bulk of my time with the texts, people, institutions, and events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain. Much of what I do as a researcher is marked by strong interests in the history of medicine, especially surgery, and in how “Medicine”—as institution, as techne, as embodied in the people who inhabit or encounter its communities (if sometimes only temporarily and perhaps under duress)—talked about itself to itself, articulated its means and ends to those not trained in its ways, and how it was in turn represented by “outsiders” in a variety of texts and contexts. But those interests, at least in those terms or with any degree of specificity, rarely (and rarely easily) find their way into my classrooms, and normally not at the undergraduate level. Nevertheless, as I imagine is the case with many of us, my thinking about my teaching practices and research interests, which in important ways are quite different, are guided by a few fundamental questions that have haunted me since my early days as a graduate student: what does it mean to “have” a body? what are the various forces that shape how we think about that meaning? who is authorized to answer those questions, and how is that authority built and acknowledged? how have shifting ideas about the body affected shifting ideas about “wellbeing”? Since those early grad student days, I have pursued those questions and sought various answers in the spaces where literary studies and medical history overlap, and I have perhaps only lately come to realize just how deeply my teaching philosophy and practices have been shaped by those efforts.
In what follows, I track two parallel narratives. The first begins with what I have always believed to be the two moments that crystallized those fundamental questions, and the second interweaves examples from some of the classes that I have taught—from a standard second-year Romantics survey, to an Honours seminar on Keats, to a graduate seminar on “Romantic Bodies”—where those questions have been most firmly on display, often in ways that are not at first glance obvious. My goal here, as in the classroom, is to urge greater attention to what I have called, borrowing from Francis Barker, the “bodiliness” of Romantic-era texts: to demonstrate what happens to our understanding of key features of Romanticism when we attend, first, to the at-times overwhelming number and variety of bodies that are and always have been at the heart of a period often seen as celebrating the metaphysical, the sublime, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” in one way or another, and, second, to some of the ways that those bodies were represented and experienced by the writers and readers of the period. And I would add that any discussion of “wellbeing,” however we are defining it—and the present volume gives us a sense of just how varied and complex the definitions can be—must at some point come to terms with the bodiliness, what I have called elsewhere the “body consciousness,” of the period. It is of course true that health and wellbeing are more than physical, quantifiable phenomena, but it is equally true that treatments of bodies often presuppose, explicitly or not, fairly or not, what is and is not “normal” or “healthy” or “well,” and thus any conception of one is necessarily caught up in a conception of the other. In this period, in particular, whether we engage with figures obsessed with Brunonian notions of excitability, emboldened by the pioneering anatomical and surgical work of John and William Hunter, or even wedded to an already-out-dated-but-still-popular theory of the Galenic humours, “wellbeing” had to contend with the complexities of our flesh worlds, to a greater or lesser degree. In the end, I seek—once again, both here and in my teaching—to encourage more sustained attention to the ways in which our understanding of our own material realities both enable and inhibit our engagements with the Romantic period and some of its key texts and ideas.
As a student in a graduate seminar, more than twenty years ago now, while having a fascinating and productive group discussion about Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, I remember an overwhelming sense of frustration that finally made me blurt out, “But what about the body?!” I understood, I thought, the idea of a disconnect between sex and gender, that effacing the distinction was heteronormative, that what were often assumed to be “essential” characteristics of gendered behaviour—including, among other things, body language—were learned. Where I struggled, though, was in coming to terms with where the body was, with what it meant, in this dynamic: is it the stage for the performance? the costume performers wear? the ground upon which the struggle of identity is fought? the prize at the end of a contest? I have since come to realize that my frustration had less to do with a lack of philosophical or theoretical understanding—still, obviously a distinct possibility—and much more to do with my inability to effectively pose the question, to deploy a vocabulary of interrogation that would help to frame an answer, however tentative and temporary it might be. And that frustration haunts me to this day: though I have since developed various strategies (grounded in a material historicist approach) and encountered vocabularies (leaning heavily on Foucault, especially in those early days) that have helped me to propose certain tactical and generative ways of asking and answering such questions, I remain aware of how far I am from a truly satisfying answer and that students at all levels experience similar frustrations as they encounter the ideas and questions that will haunt them. It is precisely the memory of the frustration itself, that desperate moment when I needed to know, even more than the details of the conversation, that I carry with me into every lecture hall and seminar room. To be sure, the question I asked was prompted by my own idiosyncratic concerns and interests, but the need that drove me to shout it out is, I think, something common to all who read and think, perhaps especially to our students.
The second moment came about a year later, when I had just begun the process of trying to develop a working proposal for my dissertation, which would eventually become my book Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. While watching a football game, I listened as the announcers talked about an injured player. I was told that “an MRI had revealed a partially torn ACL” and that “he probably won’t need surgery but will likely be out six to eight weeks.” These statements were delivered in as matter-of-fact a tone as can be imagined, as if both the announcers and everyone listening knew exactly what all of this meant. To be sure, sports fans have heard a great deal about players’ injuries, prognoses, and treatments, and many of these terms would be familiar in this context, but I was struck at this moment by the assumption that almost everyone listening (and, obviously, the announcers themselves—a broadcaster and an ex-athlete, neither a trained medical professional, one would think) could be assumed to have enough of a working knowledge of human anatomy, of specialized acronyms, of what state-of-the-art medical imaging technology could do, of specific medical procedures and their outcomes, that these statements could be offered without explanation and heard without confusion. Of course, had I not been actively thinking about the circulation of medical discourse in the public sphere I would not have thought twice about this exchange, but that’s precisely the point: our thinking about our own bodies, which would seem to be perhaps a most instinctive, intuitive operation concerning the most “natural” of things, has always been marked if not entirely dominated by the presence of hyperspecialized discourses—religious, scientific, etc.—that the majority of us have no earthly reason to know. For those of us steeped in Foucault and other theorists of power and discourse, this is hardly a new insight, but that experience provided a fantastic, real-world example that helped me to concretize my own thinking and that still serves a key pedagogical function in my classrooms. I like to frame this issue with a reference to Roy Porter’s simple and yet still profound claim that the body is always “the body in,” that the body we encounter, whether “in” flesh or text or image, is always medicalized or gendered or raced or classed or any one of a thousand other things or some combination thereof, that seeing or talking about or even imagining a body, even our own, as somehow pre- or non-discursive is impossible. The seeming immediacy of bodies often prompts immediate and understandable resistance to this kind of theorizing which can often just as quickly prompt the kind of examination of assumptions at the heart of so many pedagogical encounters.
But what does any of this have to do with teaching Romanticism, with the day-to-day classroom experiences of survey classes and advanced seminars that are part of a degree in English Language and Literature? For me at least, the answer is easy: this has everything to do with teaching, and especially with teaching Romanticism. One of the running themes in my version of the second-year Romantics survey course
at my institution (a twelve-week sprint through the period), is framed by the question “who controls the vocabulary?” When discussing British responses to the French Revolution, for example, I work to show how Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Godwin, Thelwall, Williams, and other key players in the 1790s pamphlet wars were seeking to claim the right to define the key terms of the debate: “natural,” “revolution,” “nation,” and so on. I then carry that same framework into our readings of, for example, the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Shelley’s Defence, and Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, where we encounter similar efforts to stake the same claim with terms like “poetry,” “poet,” and, again, “nature.” In many cases—in Wordsworth’s loaded observation that “poetry” is a “word of very disputed meaning,” or Wollstonecraft’s challenge to Burke to remember that a nation is “people” and not an abstraction—it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the extraordinary self-reflexivity on display, the efforts of Romantic-era writers not just to use words but to interrogate their use, engage with their meanings and effects, and reflect on their role in making the things they were ostensibly only describing. Thus, when we encounter, say, texts that consciously participate in or critique the cultures of sensibility (More’s Sensibility: A Poem), or that foreground the physical acts of reading and writing (Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), or that explore Romantic-era notions of gender (Barbauld’s “Washing Day” or Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes”), it doesn’t take much to show that the same process is at work with the word “body” and its cognates, and to further show what that process does to the sense of “bodiliness” in those texts. More shows us problematic bodies that perform and “conscious” ones that read and critique that performance, and having students generate a simple list of references to bodies, body parts, and bodily responses (sighing, blushing, crying, etc.) either on the spot in class or in their reading notes prior to our meeting helps to underscore the deeply embodied nature of sensibility as she uses and critiques it. Blake shows us reading and writing as distinctly physical, material activities, not disembodied concepts, and introducing students to the plates as provided in the digital William Blake Archive encourages them to see the centrality of embodied, sensual experience in Blake’s thought. Barbauld and Keats show us bodies that act and react in the world, bodies as subjects and as objects, and emphasizing the degree to which they foreground the materiality of labour, of love, of lust, and of loss to show how they mark and are marked by bodies encourages students to see these ideas as more than abstractions.
In terms of course content, then, such efforts let us explore in a productively contained way some of the period’s key terms and ideas, while also ensuring that we can see the interconnectedness of those terms that lead some to identify enough of a sense of cohesion to label the period, if often problematically, as Romantic. In terms of classroom practice, two features of this particular class and my teaching style more generally come to mind. First, I’m always conscious of my own bodiliness in the classroom space: to teach is, of course, to perform, and that is most true and most evident for me in the lecture hall. I’ve been told (not as a criticism, I think!) on more than one occasion that my lectures are “high energy,” as I constantly move about the space, often using exaggerated gestures and changing the projection of my voice (I may or may not frequently shout and, very occasionally, sing. . . badly) for dramatic effect. While I am an advocate for student-centred learning, I work to make my voice and embodied self the focal point of the classroom, giving students a single, if moving, target in the space of the lecture hall—in an effort tokeep them engaged and interested, yes, but also to force a particular kind of deeply focussed attention without (usually) the distraction or relief of PowerPoint and other audio-visual technologies. The point is less to make my body the focus (which isn’t always ideal or productive or even possible for all instructors
), but to use my bodiliness—gestures, voice, movements within the space, etc.—to create a single, dynamic point of reference to which students can return when they look up from their texts and notes. Second, I often encourage students to read aloud so that they might, first, hear things that they don’t see on the page, and, second, so that they develop a sense of the physicality of the reading experience: if I am to argue for an attention to the body consciousness of Romantic writing, I think it’s equally crucial to emphasize the bodies that are engaging with that writing. It helps, to be sure, that many of the writers and texts we spend time with often dwell on what it means to read aloud. Whether we’re discussing William Hazlitt’s fascination with Coleridge as a preacher in “My First Acquaintance with Poets” or John Thelwall’s fiery renditions of Godwin for crowds in the 1790s, and whether talking about the Cockney rhymes of Hunt and Keats that are only heard when they are spoken or Joanna Baillie’s demand that her plays be recognized as scripts for performance, I’m always careful to remind students that an attention to the bodiliness of Romantic-texts doesn’t just mean pointing to the bodies represented in them; it also means engaging with the bodies, all of them, that write, speak, and read. Until drafting this essay—and I owe profound thanks to the volume’s editors for this—I never really thought in depth about the fact that about a third of the majors in my department are actually Concurrent Education students, and thus in the process of becoming teachers themselves, so a more critically self-aware attention to the embodied nature of teaching and of learning may serve to help them think more reflexively about how they will lead their own classrooms one day, even as it foregrounds those aspects of the period that I find most fascinating. Thus, in relation both to the questions and topics I ask students to think about and in an awareness of the classroom as a communal space we bodily inhabit, I’m working to model ways of navigating the often maddeningly complex terrain of terms, theories, and approaches that make up Literary Studies by demonstrating, on one hand, that the Romantics themselves were faced with similar frustrations, and, on the other, how I as a reader, teacher, and researcher deal with them myself.
Similar efforts to encourage a sense of critical self-awareness that works in tandem with the material are manifest in an Honours seminar I sometimes teach called “Keats and Romanticism.” We spend the first three of twelve three-hour sessions reading as many of Keats’ poems and letters as we can in the time we have (most of the selections in Jeffrey Cox’s splendid Norton Critical Edition), and then we spend the rest of the term diving into a highly selective version of “Keats Studies,” first reading excerpts from his early biographers and interpreters in the nineteenth century, before moving on to extracts from the New Critics, the Harvard Keatsians, some of the canonical studies of the mid-twentieth century, the textual scholarship of the 1970s, and then to and through the theoretical turn of the 1980s and 90s, before sampling some extraordinary recent work.
Aside from having senior undergraduates face the demands of reading scholarship, the point is to see how our reading of Keats shapes and is shaped by our understanding of Romanticism (or, later, romanticisms), and to see how our understanding of Romanticism shapes and is shaped by larger shifting trends in Literary Studies. Of course, we could substitute almost any writer, from almost any period, to achieve much the same thing, but his relatively small body of work together with the popular appeal of his biography makes Keats, I think, an ideal choice—and since he is so often both the darling and the punching bag of theorists from the New Critics on, the case for “why Keats?” is an easy one to make.
By the time they come to this course, many students are aware of some of my own research interests, so it comes as no surprise to them when I highlight the references to Keats’ medical training in the letters, or trace the overt physicality of a poem like “Lamia,” or describe the opening, post-battle scene of “Hyperion” as “triage.” But, as always, I try to show that an appreciation for “bodiliness” throws a number of key critical questions into stark relief. For example, students are often intrigued and somewhat frustrated when we note how little attention the early biographies pay to the material realities of Keats’ life (and how almost no attention at all is paid to his early life); it’s true that in some cases the historical evidence wasn’t available to those early reviewers, but it’s also true that they often simply weren’t concerned enough with questions of material history to even bemoan its absence. For students who are particularly interested in these questions, I direct them either to later biographical studies (Roe’s John Keats, in particular) or to one or more of the critical studies that focus on Keats’ time at Guy’s (depending on the specifics of their interests) and encourage them to think not just about what new evidence became available but how existing evidence was re-valued. When we move from the sensual Keats of the Victorians as they try to rescue the immoral young Cockney to the apparently uncontexted, bodiless poet of the New Critics, to the deeply embodied and situated poet we’ve come to know since the ground-breaking work of Nicholas Roe in the mid-1990s, we can see not only the changes in what we’ve learned about Keats over the past two centuries but also the shifting trends in Literary Studies and Critical Theory (and the changing fortunes of the body as material entity and concept). The assignment structure for the class (for most of my classes) tends to be fairly traditional—article summaries and critiques, short presentations, and standard term papers—but some of the topics that the students have generated, almost always entirely on their own, speak directly to the concerns of this essay and this volume as a whole. One particularly memorable essay compared a number of biographical accounts of Keats’ time at Guy’s Hospital to examine the role of that particular time in Keats’ life in the “story” as the biographers were telling it. Another worked to read the depiction of women’s bodies in some of the later poems in relation to the Fanny Brawne letters to explore the seeming disconnect between Keats’ misogynistic tendencies in some poems with what she identified as the tenderness and vulnerability on display in those love letters. Another engaged with some recent critical work and collected references to breath and breathing in the poems and letters and made a case for an understanding of “inspiration” as a profoundly embodied activity. I don’t consciously encourage students to think specifically about bodies and embodiment, though surely I must often do so more-or-less unconsciously, and the critical readings I require as reading are derived at least as much from my own interests as they are from my sense of the landscape of Keats Studies. But as these senior undergraduate students bring their own varied theoretical and critical interests (and frustrations) to ongoing classroom discussions, I’m always struck by how often my insistence that we pay attention to the bodiliness of Keats’ work, together with some consideration of the place of an attention to that bodiliness in Keats Studies, helps them to come to some new realization not just about the poet but about their own interests and patron theorists. That is, even if they are not interested in connecting the bodiliness of Keats’ work to his medical training, reflecting on that bodiliness may help them to think more critically, more reflexively, about key aspects of the material dimensions of gender, class, race, labour, artistic expression, and so on. And I increasingly believe that such realizations are, perhaps not only, but certainly more possible in the shared, physical, and embodied space of the classroom.
Finally, I sometimes teach a graduate seminar in our MA program called “Romantic Bodies” that seeks, first, to work with the transdisciplinary field of “Body Studies” (sometimes rendered in the literature as “Body Culture Studies,” and which I describe as a consciously ill-formed “field” of study that borrows and adapts from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, from Philosophy to Sociology to Historiography, always focussed on the body and bodiliness) and, second, to construct something of an “Alternative Romanticism”—“alternative” in the sense that I assume grad students come in with some kind of working understanding of the period, whether a passing familiarity with some canonical names or something more in depth, and I work to try to defamiliarize the period by forcing attention on what I claim is literally “a poetry of flesh and blood”—which is rarely, at that level at least, an approach that they have considered or encountered.
We begin by working to recognize that a popular and still enormously influential understanding of “Romanticism,” by which I mean the kind of thing students glean in general historical surveys or in entries in dictionaries of literary terms or in the casual references to the period that appear in their other classes, is dominated by notions of the sublime, imagination, emotion, metaphysicality, the “ideal,” and the like. But rather than emphasize the poetics of the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” I then urge us to take literally Wordsworth’s expressed desire to keep his “Reader in the company of poetry of flesh and blood.” The primary readings for the course are heavily canonical, for the point is precisely to interrogate a canonical understanding of Romanticism: the last time I taught the course, for example, I used Duncan Wu’s Romantic Poetry from the Blackwell Essential Literature Series, which includes only canonical selections from the Big Six, and supplemented with some selections (including, for example, “Beachy Head” and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) from Paula Feldman’s anthology British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. The goal is to provide a relatively specific point of access to something we all think we know (the treatment and depiction of “bodiliness” in widely known Romantic poetry), to lay bare our shared assumptions (as one student put it in a course evaluation, “my historical survey didn’t tell me there were so. many. bodies. in poems that I thought talked all about the imagination and emotion”), to introduce a set of tools to examine those assumptions (drawn particularly from the anthology The Body: A Reader, edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, and supplemented with texts such as Paul Youngquist’s “Lyrical Bodies” and Alan Richardson’s “Keats and the Glories of the Brain”), and then to encourage the seminar’s participants to bring their eclectic theoretical/political/literary interests to bear. The presentations, term papers, and class discussions, most often generated by the students themselves, on gender and canonicity, selfhood and identity, poetry and aesthetics, even book history, among other things, have been among the most fascinating and generative I’ve experienced and rival even some of the best conference sessions I’ve attended. And I think the key is that the course is decidedly not focussed on medicine (though of course it comes up, usually when discussing Keats and Coleridge, as one can imagine, or, more likely, when I’m directing the discussion in the absence of student-led presentation) but rather on the body and bodiliness; the students, encouraged to bring their own theoretical concerns to the material, primary and secondary, inevitably find ways to read against the grain, make connections between theorists, and pursue interesting readings of the primary material that I could not—yes, sometimes in ways that are wildly fantastic and ill-advised, but often generative and novel, and always fascinating. In these circumstances, when my own inclination is to appeal to “the body in” medical discourse, I am always, in the best ways, forced to acknowledge the discursive effects of my own words on both the material at hand and, perhaps more crucially, on the classroom dynamic. To put it simply, and to cite an example that often comes up in my classes, grad and undergrad alike, just because I want to (and can’t seem to help but) read the opening sequence of “Hyperion” as a depicting the practice of triage Keats would have learned at Guy’s—to argue that when Thea touches Saturn “upon that aching spot / Where beats the human heart” (42-43) she is in effect checking his vital signs—that doesn’t mean that we have to or even should read it that way, that my doing so is a perfect example of treating “the body in” medical discourse. Encouraging students to think and read critically for themselves, I’m reminded in these moments, must include encouraging them to think and read critically what I as their instructor teach them.
While I don’t know for sure if any of the students who have taken these classes over the years have had the same ultimately generative moment of exasperation that I had, I can say without hesitation that my own such moment at once lead me to do the work I do in the way that I do it and continues to impact the ways I think about teaching. Even when my specialized interests in the body, bodiliness, and medical history don’t or can’t be brought to the foreground of class discussions, they do still provide, first, key points of access and framing devices that help to curate the sometimes chaotic space of the classroom by providing key points of reference both in the room and in the texts, and second, constant reminders that I was once sitting in their seat, simultaneously fascinated and terrified by ideas that seemed completely new and by questions and insights that I assumed were unique to me. And it should be obvious to us all that such a sense of self-awareness, including the too-often mistaken but still overwhelming impression that one struggles in isolation, is a key element in any effort to foster “wellbeing”—as true for the Romantics as it for us and our students. Self-consciously embodying those struggles by engaging with the very notion of “embodying” itself demands that I think critically about ways to bring together my work as both researcher and teacher and, I always hope, makes me better at both.
