Romance Reconsidered: Roundtable

Roundtable: Romance Reconsidered Chair and Moderator: Emily Ogden, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia Presenters: Colin Jager, Professor of English, Rutgers University; Carrie Hyde, Assistant Professor of... [ view full abstract ]

Roundtable: Romance Reconsidered

Chair and Moderator: Emily Ogden, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia

Presenters: Colin Jager, Professor of English, Rutgers University; Carrie Hyde, Assistant Professor of English, UCLA; Jennifer L. Fleissner, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University

Respondent: Jared Hickman, Associate Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

The term romance has a daunting capaciousness: it has meant a courtly medieval fiction, a fanciful story, a nation-founding myth, an erotic novel, and a knowing modern revival of one of the above. The common denominator here is escape: the flight of a simple reader into a simpler time. In American studies in particular, romance has often connoted an escape from the political. Richard Chase and Lionel Trilling’s notion of the American romance, ever (ma)lingering over the “marvelous,” as distinct from the British novel with its steadfast commitment to the “probable,” was foundational for the field of American studies in general and nineteenth-century literary studies in particular. Since subjected to searching feminist and historicist critiques (by Nina Baym and others), and anti-exceptionalist critiques (by Amy Kaplan and others), the notion may seem—happily—to have been relegated to the dustbin of critical history The purpose of this roundtable, however, is to explore how the American romance theory might be constructively revamped. G.R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link have shown just how pervasive the romance/novel distinction was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including its transatlantic breakdown. They and others have also probed the New Americanist rejection of the American romance theory as entirely corrupted by its servicing of Cold War claims for US exceptionalism. New questions can now be asked about the pertinence of the “romance” to both Anglo-American literary history and historiography. What might the immanent (self-) identification of nineteenth-century American narrative fictions as—disproportionately—“romances” legitimately tell us about Anglo-American literary history? Might romance yet provide an opening to a reasonable and responsible discussion of US cultural particularity? At the intersection of histories of fictionality and secularity, might the romance/novel distinction index different phenomenological inhabitations of what Charles Taylor has called our “immanent frame”? Does the contempt for escape encoded in dismissals of the romance itself have a history—one bound up in secular imperatives to be rational and clear-sighted—and might critics want to analyze that history rather than repeating it in a new form? Rather than an escape from the political, might romance, arising as it does from medieval eschatological notions of the westward transit of empire, provide a key to understanding the theopolitics of settler colonialism in North America? In sum, what might this robust period distinction illuminate rather than obscure?

Colin Jager will start the roundtable off with a consideration of Walter Scott's canonical distinction between romance and history in Waverley.  Since that novel's account of Jacobitism is to some extent a way of working through Jacobinism, Jager reads Waverly as dismissing political revolution as romance. He continues to track the relations between romance and revolution in Mary Shelley's walk through the ruins of post-Napoleonic France in History of a Six Week's Tour. Finally, Jager moves to the new world context, where he considers slave rebellion as romance in Haiti and in the legend/account of three-fingered Jack. Carrie Hyde takes up the question of romance and politics by identifying Nathaniel Hawthorne’s formulations of “romance” as the site of unexpected political discernment. She argues that the romantic conceit of fiction’s separation from everyday politics allowed writers to engage and reconfigure early U.S. arguments about the right to choose not to belong—which sought to denaturalize nativity (jus soli, right of the soil) as the basis of political membership. Hyde asks such larger questions as, what would it mean to understand fictionality as a special branch of critique rather than its epistemic foil? What does politics look like if we take idealism rather than empiricism as our guiding point of reference? Hyde seeks to untether political critique from the indexical regime of realism by rethinking the political currency of a term and concept that long has provided its symbolic counterpoint: romance. Jennifer L. Fleissner continues Hyde’s inquiry into romance and critique. She observes that it is possible to see the "depth" mode of critique that many critics have rejected as predicated on a split between realism (what you see is what you get) and romance (for which there is always a "little lower layer," as Ahab says)—to wit, the Kantian division to which Latour and so many others object.  Though some have reacted against this by insisting on a new realism or descriptivism, Fleissner argues that, particularly in American studies, it has become much more common to conceive of the realism/romance divide as in error because of romantic potentialities that shoot through the realist everyday. Such work can be very powerful. But precisely because of its present dominance, Fleissner wants to ask what the realism/romance collapse may leave out—whether there aren't important things to say about those moments when realism resists romance, or vice versa. The roundtable will conclude with a response by Jared Hickman.