The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. These essays explore older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.
Abstract
The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. These essays explore older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes.
Of Tangled Webs and Busted Sets: Tropologies of Number and Shape in the Fiction of John Galt
Matthew WickmanAbstract
In a provocative passage in his novel Annals of the Parish, John Galt figures the massive social and economic transformations in late eighteenth-century Scotland by way of an image of a “great web of commercial reciprocities,” each part acting on every other. A prescient and, today, fairly standard illustration of global connectivity, Galt’s “great web” also corresponds with the idea of a set of all sets whose paradox Bertrand Russell would expose in the early twentieth century.
Abstract
This essay explores problems of reference raised by Wordsworth’s short lyric, “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways.” The critical angle comes from a) analytic models rarely consulted by readers of Wordsworth (e.g., Gottlob Frege’s “On Sense and Reference,” John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic), and b) inter-texts new to the scholarship on the Lucy poems (e.g., Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Gertrude Stein’s lecture, “Poetry and Grammar”).
Abstract
This essay examines how William Wordsworth and Charles Babbage used mathematical analogies in order to imagine an ideal medium free from the distorting biases of the printed book and industrial machinery, respectively. The argument focuses principally on the episode of the shell and the stone in Book Five of The Prelude, in which Wordsworth pairs poetry with Euclidean geometry as “the knowledge that endures,” and Chapter 2 of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, in which Babbage uses the mathematical structure of the difference engine, a forebear of the digi
Abstract
McLane’s essay responds to the prompts offered by Wickman, Levinson, Brooke-Smith in their inquiries into “Romantic Number.” Using The Jackson Five’s song “ABC” as a kind of ludic case, she draws forth the logic of counting vs. matching, the status of order and seriality, the utility of set-theory for thinking romanticism; she notes as well the increasing interest of scholars in emergent complexity. A final detour through Wallace Stevens mediates her reflections on the status of “the one” and of deixis itself in Romanticism and its afterlives.
Abstract
This essay examines how the figure of an “automaton poet” served as a testing ground for Romantic-era arguments about the mind’s internal structure, first and foremost in Coleridge’s assertion that poetry is an activity unassailable by the materialist science of nerves, fibers, and organs. The poet must not be made into an automaton, Coleridge argues, precisely because poetry “brings the whole soul of man into activity,” and thus resembles the undifferentiated or domain-general nature of consciousness itself.
Abstract
The seminal motif of Romanticism’s critique of capitalism is sympathy for losers. Like poetic successors such as Keats, Adam Smith has the implicit good faith to acknowledge that the commodity form is total and consequently that sympathy must be immanent, must follow a consumerist logic of its own.
Abstract
In the wake of the 1795 food crisis, a number of agricultural, governmental, and charity institutions developed a new discourse of population for understanding the disaffected masses. The gambit for these institutions was that by understanding population—numbers of people, their distribution, their ages, and their occupations—they could create policies to control and appease the crowd of distressed poor and working class peoples. While population provides an ordering of life, the “swinish multitude” serves as a figure for life in excess of population.
Abstract
McLane’s essay responds to the prompts offered by Savarese, Earle, and Broglio in their inquiries into “Romantic Number.” She notes a productive oscillation between quantitative and qualitative accountings—between the uncountable “mass” in Broglio and “mere countability” (to quote Earle) in Earle and Savarese. Teasing out the implications of their work for a discourse on measure, she invokes recent work on precarity and the common.