Troping Mood: Pfau, Wordsworth, and Hegel

© 2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 373–383, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00611.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLICOLiterature Compass1741-41131741-4113© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd61110.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00611.xDecember 200800373???383???RomanticismTroping MoodTroping Mood

Troping Mood: Pfau, Wordsworth, and Hegel

David Collings*Bowdoin College

AbstractDrawing on discussions of mood in Kant, Novalis, Hegel, and Heidegger, ThomasPfau, in his recent major work, Romantic Moods, provides an innovative andphilosophically nuanced approach to the study of affect. In doing so, he chal-lenges key aspects of new historicism, arguing that history is to be found not inactual events but in the prediscursive, collective, quasi-cognitive mood that partlyregisters and partly resists them. Such a mood, he argues, can never be captureddirectly, but is best evoked in the virtual mode of literature; as a result, ratherthan falsifying a material history, literature remains faithful to a bewilderedhistoricity betrayed by the fixity of actual events. Yet Pfau’s analysis of threesubperiods of romantic paranoia, trauma, and melancholy tends to separate themtoo strictly from each other; in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems, Blake’s Bookof Urizen, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the literature of paranoia, by carrying outa critique of its own premises, transforms into the literature of trauma, therebyshifting from the articulation of one mood into that of another. These instancesof self-critique participate in a literary version of the dialectic, whereby feelingreflects formally on itself. Moreover, Pfau’s interweaving of romantic lyric andmodern philosophical reflection suggests that for him, romanticism is an exemplaryinstance of modernity; what he leaves out of view is the possibility that moder-nity itself is a trope, a strong interpretation, to which we might best respond witha nonmodern critique.

How best can we recover a philosophically nuanced understanding ofaffect for romantic studies? There is little doubt that such an effort is bynow necessary; under the influence of deconstruction and new historicism,romantic criticism has often seen affect as an epiphenomenon of thelinguistic figure or a dimension of an ideologically problematic retreat fromhistory into interiority. In the past decade or so a number of scholars havebegun to examine the cultural articulation of certain leading emotionalstates in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, tracingthat literature’s place in the history of subjectivity. But more recently still,Thomas Pfau, in his major work Romantic Moods, and particularly in thetheoretical discussion in his two opening chapters, on which I will focushere, has regarded mood not so much as a dimension of a positive historybut rather as a state that, while palpable within the lyric, is not fully

374 Troping Mood

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 373–383, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00611.xJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

represented there, nor indeed capable of being represented or known inany familiar sense. In effect, he treats mood as phenomenologically distinctfrom a material or discursive history, as something that hovers just beneaththe domain of texts without truly being captured there. In doing so, Pfauprovides a distinctive approach not only to mood and interiority but alsoto history itself, conceiving of mood as a site for understanding history’snoncoincidence with itself. Yet in two significant respects the book invitesan internal critique. By leaving its account of the relation between thearticulation of three key moods largely implicit, it opens the possibility ofexamining further a reflective, even dialectical movement between them.Moreover, by relying on the notion of modernity whose status it does notdirectly examine, it remains vulnerable to what we might call, followingBruno Latour, a nonmodern critique.

In his book, Pfau draws primarily on moments in Kant, Novalis, Hegel,and Heidegger to identify mood’s status as a ‘latent principle’, a ‘holisticdisposition’ prior to conscious awareness, practice, or articulation. For Pfau,as for Heidegger, mood is the ‘horizon wherein all conscious practice . . . isbeing transacted, a horizon that therefore can never come into view assuch’; it is mood’s nature ‘to resist discernment, particularly where attemptsare made to positively, consciously fix it in representational form’ (10).Mood shares the ‘irreducibly historical’ dimension of Dasein, that domainof angst or bewilderment that characterizes a ‘perilous historical situated-ness’ (11). Yet as Pfau also suggests, building in part on Martha Nussbaum’swork, through mood ‘communities establish a sustained, quasi-intentionaland tacitly evaluative relation to their experiential world’. At once priorto thought itself and ‘quasi-cognitive’, mood occupies a phenomenologicallyelusive status. If, as Heidegger proposes, one should not attempt to fix moodrepresentationally, a process that would destroy it, but should insteadawaken it, then as Pfau suggests, ‘the desired awakening can only ever berealized in the figural, virtual domain of the aesthetic’ (10). Indeed, as Pfaushows, Kant and his successors, especially the Jena romantics, ‘progressivelyconceived “mood” as an aesthetic phenomenon, something that can belaid bare only in’ aesthetic practice, in ‘the modality of virtual, figuralconstructions’ (12).

Given these premises, it is clear that Pfau’s reworking of affect also bearsdirectly on a series of further questions for romantic studies. Approachedin this way, Pfau argues, ‘ “mood” opens up a new type of historicalunderstanding: no longer referential, thematic, or accumulatively contextual’(7). Although analyses throughout the book make clear that Pfau draws uponempirical history quite often and takes its relevance seriously, neverthelessfor him history takes place more crucially on the level of mood, in a sphereone cannot know directly and to which one cannot simply reduce anyaesthetic formulation. For Pfau, the ‘gravitational pull’ of prediscursivemood ‘draws attention to the myriad ways in which individuals and com-munities are always embedded in antagonistic ideological and discursive


Troping Mood 375

networks that they can neither transcend nor comprehend in systematicform’ (16). This passage echoes a claim familiar from historicism – thatworks of literature are thoroughly ideological, caught within a momentwhose parameters they cannot transcend – but in this case the history theyattempt to figure is not a material ensemble but rather as elusive as theLacanian real.

Insofar as Pfau considers mood as something we can neither compre-hend nor transcend, his critical practice takes on an unusual tone. As hedelineates the aesthetic articulation of three romantic moods – paranoia,trauma, and melancholy – he makes clear that the theoretical resources hebrings to bear on each are also shaped by each, so that, for example,Freud’s theory of paranoia becomes an instance of what it analyzes. Thisrecursive, insistent quality of mood, he suggests, is an instance of thehermeneutic circle (14). Here philosophical, psychoanalytic, theoretical,or critical analysis does not surpass its object, but repeats it in a newidiom, expanding the discursive frameworks through which a particularmood might be conceived. In his reading each of the three moods isextended across time into the present, appearing in the very resources thatone can bring to bear in the critical enterprise itself. This approachchallenges the stance of much new historicist practice, which eitherprivileges present critique at the expense of the romantic text or treats thetext as a dimension of a relatively distant and irrecuperable historicalmoment. In contrast, Pfau locates himself within the ensemble he examines,accepting the general validity of the model of history that subtends allthree moods, both in their philosophical formulation and in their initialaesthetic figuration (25). As a result, this approach awakens mood onceagain rather than attempting to master it through a definitive analysis.

But this account of mood does have a potentially perplexing feature.In his wide-ranging discussion of both English and German literary texts,especially lyric poetry, Pfau locates each of three moods loosely within asubperiod of the romantic era: paranoia in the decade of the 1790s, amood exemplified by Caleb Williams, The Book of Urizen, and the treasontrials; trauma during the period of the Napoleonic wars (1793 through 1815),exemplified by Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ and the lyrics of Eichendorff; andmelancholy in the postwar period (1815 through 1840), exemplified bythe lyrics of Keats and Heine. For students of the period, the attributionof these moods to these subperiods might well seem instantly plausible.Nevertheless, the implications of such assignments are initially unclear.Must one conclude that a material history underlies mood after all, or thatmood is in some way ‘caused’ by the events of a given era? Yet the theoryof mood offered here resists any reduction of mood to its material context.Thus it seems one can assign mood to a given era only by reconceivingof how history itself takes place. In ‘dissenting from the vexing determinacyof history’, Pfau writes, ‘literature does not simply imagine some dream-world but aims to recover a knowledge occluded by the specious, indeed,

376 Troping Mood


irrational, fixity and coherence of so-called actual history’, to figure fortha ‘transcendental, unconscious’ experience of ‘the real, or “history” . . . thathas necessarily been “missed” ’ (25). Here history appears in two guises, firstas the specious, irrational fixity of ‘actual’ history and second as a ‘history’,placed under unusual quotation marks, which is affiliated with the real.This marked split usage of the term history implies the further argumentthat material history itself perpetually fails to hit its mark or to reach itsdestination, falsifying a palpable historical volatility into the speciouscoherence of actual events. One must also infer that for Pfau, a givenhistorical moment is noncoincident with itself, characterized not only byits actual events but also by a mood that registers them without submittingto them. Accordingly, one does not grasp the truth of literature by deci-phering its mystification of a prior material history, but on the contrary– in a strong revision of new historicism – finds the truth of events in themood to which they give rise and which literature aspires to figure forth,even if in the terms of that moment’s ideologies. Events may incite mood,but cannot explain them and have no epistemological priority over them;rather, they point to a volatile domain that necessarily exceeds them andto which only aesthetic practice can attempt to do justice.

As its approach to the question of history makes clear, Romantic Moodsoffers a model of rigorously nonreductive reading, one that refuses toidentify what Alan Liu, in an Althusserian vein, calls the ‘absent cause’ ofhistory with any positive content – for example, with a referential history,the pure movement of rhetorical trope, scientific or sociological knowledge,or a philosophy of representation (39). The concept of mood allows Pfauto prise open each of these potentially reductive modes of analysis. Byinvoking mood as quasi-cognitive, as historically situated without beinghistorically reducible, Pfau creates a space adjacent to cognition and historywhich they cannot actually capture. In effect, this approach provides a theoryof noncoincidence, one that protects the horizon of experience from anyclaim to have comprehended it, thereby opening up a space for a specifi-cally virtual mode of apprehension in the aesthetic.

But several key questions remain, particularly with regard to thedeployment of those three moods. How best can we understand theirendurance well into later historical periods? If paranoia arises in Englandduring the 1790s, for example, how does it reappear in Freud’s analysis?Can we in fact assume that the paranoia Freud finds in Schreber’s memoiris in some sense the same mood we might find in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,even if these texts are written many decades apart? Since Freud was notattempting to interpret Godwin’s text, it seems most plausible to arguethat these two authors were attempting to figure a common mood, onethat evidently reappears at various junctures in the modern era. Pfau doesnot pause to theorize the exact premises on which one can bring thesedivergent articulations under the same rubric; unfortunately, the questionregarding the basis for reading English romanticism and German philosophy


Troping Mood 377

together, a careful answer to which would place philosophically orientedromantic criticism on much firmer ground, is still largely unexplored inthe field. But one can nevertheless infer from this work an incipient answerto this question, at least with regard to affect. A given mood, it seems, canregister the events of one era as well as another: it is a perpetual resourcefor modern culture, rather than an affect tied exclusively to its moment.In shifting from a material history to affective historicity, then, Pfau alsolocates mood not so much in a given subperiod as in modernity overall;evidently each of these three moods, and presumably others, perpetuallyrecur as modernity unfolds itself. The recurrence of romantic moodsin later moments, particularly those registered in German philosophical,psychoanalytic, theoretical, and interpretive discourses, suggests that RomanticMoods, despite its title, actually provides a new account of modernity perse, placing it under the sway not of any economic, political, or metaphysicalregime but rather of a particular affective condition.

Yet this redescribed version of modernity must, like the others, have itsgenealogy. Thus the book quickly sketches an argument in its openingpages that traces a shift from an ‘Augustan strategy’ of containing thepassions, through a developing discourse of regulating feeling in the workof Hume and Smith, toward an array of discussions in the romantic erathat, under the pressure of the unprecedented pace and unpredictability ofhistorical change, more openly recognize the quasi-cognitive dimension ofemotion (2; 4–7). In effect, Pfau suggests that a recognition of the inde-pendent cultural significance of mood emerges historically and that mood’sparticular rendition of historicity is proper to an era in which the coherenceof political orientation or social structure is perpetually stretched to thebreaking point. The fact that mood exceeds its material context is theresult of a historical process; apparently modernity is shaped by a crucialmeta-context, the erosion of certainty, which may emerge contingently butnow constitutes the transcendental field in which we live. The slippagehere between contingent and transcendental should give us pause, for itraises the possibility that modernity itself might be contingent, that we maynot be embedded in its terms without appeal. Are we caught in a certainHeideggerian historical situatedness or within the consequences of a con-tingent history? Such a question hints that in Pfau’s critical approach thereremains one crucially unthought term, modernity, which marks the passagefrom a presumably comprehensible world to one perpetually unsettled bya sheer historical process. Pfau’s account of mood enables a theory ofnoncoincidence, to be sure, yet it relies on its own historiographical reduc-tion, a strong claim about modernity’s difference from what came before.Putting pressure on that claim raises the prospect of a nonmodern analysisof modernity to which I will return below.

A somewhat different question arises from the book’s reliance on therecurrence of three moods to characterize a significant portion of modernaffective experience. If these three recur, and all three are symptomatic of

378 Troping Mood


a common condition, in what way are they related? As I mentioned earlier,Pfau argues that all three moods rest on the ‘fundamental validity’ of a sharedinterpretive model, that culture gains its ‘formal consistency and socialsignificance’ at the expense of the real (25). In effect, then, the three moodsdemarcate the experience of a shared dilemma in slightly different ways.But the book does not explore the possibility that they are implicated ineach other, draw upon each other, or potentially lead to each other. Agiven mood, it seems, does not easily move: it does not lead beyond itselfto another.

Yet on many levels the book suggests that mood may have a greatermobility than its overt analyses suggest. From the start, it points to a certainmultivalence of Dasein by choosing to map out three moods, rather than,for instance, the single bare affect of angst. Moreover, it contends that fixityis an attribute not of mood but of historical events; it assigns paranoia andtrauma to subperiods that overlap chronologically; and it argues that moodis volatile, perpetually exceeding any discourse that attempts to capture it.Indeed, its mapping of the period through three moods is never presentedas definitive or exhaustive. As a result, the book’s own terms imply thatmood exceeds any tight periodization, indeed any precise characterization,and that it is best captured in the virtual form of aesthetic figuration inpart because only the mobility, the turning, of aesthetic tropes can captureits volatility.

To test this extrapolation from the book’s argument, one might bestexamine the mobility of mood alongside that of trope. Consider Words-worth’s Salisbury Plain poems, which exemplify certain transformations heunderwent early in his career. Salisbury Plain, the initial version of the poembegun in 1793, places innocent wanderers in a space inundated by darkness,tempest, human sacrifice, and the return of the dead. A cosmic violencedevastates these wanderers and the entire landscape of the plain from whollyoutside them, and the narrator in turn concludes the poem with a lengthydenunciation of that violence, particularly its expression in imperialism andcounterrevolutionary war. In a stunning instance of paranoid figuration, itproposes that one can blame its characters’ homelessness – an exemplaryinstance of Dasein – on the acts of the British government.

In the revision that takes shape roughly from 1795 to 1797, Adventureson Salisbury Plain transforms the poem into a figuration of trauma. Thepoem’s protagonist, a sailor, now shares in the violence he endures, for onhis return from war he commits murder near his own doorstep. Here thevictim becomes a perpetrator, even if his action marks how deeply war hasviolated him. He is neither simply innocent nor simply guilty; his guilt,paradoxically, speaks of his former innocence even as it makes himcomplicit in the violence that destroyed him. The poem complicates thisscenario further in its central scenes: the sailor, upon encountering a hangedman in a gibbet-mast, falls into a trance, as if his violation of another mustultimately violate himself, a suggestion that comes true in the poem’s final


Troping Mood 379

stanza when he, too, is hanged in a gibbet. The poem’s figural logicprecisely articulates the dense affect of trauma, which marks a devastatingviolence against the subject while implicating it in what it resists. HereDasein is not simply thrown into its homelessness by a malevolent force,for it is caught as well by its own involuntary malevolence. Thus the turnfrom one version of the poem to another makes unusually visible how apoem, in the course of revision, might cross from figuring one mood tofiguring another – in this case by rethinking a polarizing opposition astraumatic implication.

What can one infer from this crossing? Is this revision motivated by ashift in a collective mood, by the poet’s sense that the polarized scenarioof the early 1790s has passed into another, in which no political agent inEngland or France is innocent? Or is it motivated by Wordsworth’s critiqueof his own premises, by his passage through the limitations of paranoidfiguration to a more capacious, if potentially more harrowing, possibility?In either case, it seems that for mood to register a shift in historical events,it must also reflect on a shift in the affective tone of its historical situatedness;like history, mood also must move. It follows that literature’s task, particularlyat such a historical turn, is to reflect upon the limitations of a particularaffect on the verge of transformation: its capacity to figure mood in virtualform, joined with its capacity to draw special attention to the logic offiguration itself, suggests that it can become conscious of the limitationsof any given form and thereby of the quasi-cognitive features of the under-lying mood. Thus Wordsworth’s autocritique, aligned as it is with trauma,may figure the unconscious process whereby a broader collective strainsagainst the tendentiousness of paranoia. One mood may take another as itsembedded target, just as one poem may register the intricate modulationof one mood into another through a quasi-cognitive turn. If so, then a givenmood may not be an absolutely intimate rendition of Dasein’s situatedness,but may implicitly contain another mood it tenuously hopes to revise. Theturning of the literary figure may capture, in partial or tentative form, themovement of collective affect, a kind of circulation around the real.

The possibility that the revised poem figures a broader shift in mood isborne out by the appearance of similar turns in other texts of roughly thesame moment. One exemplary instance is Blake’s The First Book of Urizen,engraved in 1794, a text Pfau foregrounds in his discussion of paranoia. Inits opening plates, this text constitutes a virtually total protest against itsinherited institutional contexts, articulating a truly hyperbolic, indeedparanoid, mood. Yet when the poem extends its critique of Urizen to Los,the figure of the poet himself, it forces the poet – and by extension thereader – into a stunning encounter with the chaos of history. To capturethe pathos of this moment, Pfau cites Walter Benjamin’s parable of theangel of history from the Theses on the Philosophy of History, and in doingso, implicitly aligns certain passages of the poem closely with the mood oftrauma, or indeed the characteristic Benjaminian mood of melancholy,

380 Troping Mood


which he explores at length later in the book (108, 110). With this argu-ment, I would suggest, Pfau already sketches the poem’s own troping ofmood: here again a poem shatters the conspiratorial and polarizing termson which it previously relied and enters into a new mode, into an ‘abjectintuition’ that history has ‘compromised all means for our recovery fromit’ (107–8).

A similar turn takes place in the final chapter of Godwin’s Caleb Williams,published 1794, which Pfau also places in his discussion of paranoia.Although Godwin intended to explore the rhetoric of paranoia to thebitter end and drafted a final chapter to do so, his revision of that chapterdepicts Caleb recognizing that his totalizing accusation against Falklandand indeed against all of England as a vast scene of conspiratorial vigilancemonitoring his every action was itself a form of violence, that in hisassertion of innocence he too had become a murderer. This turn againsthis own ideological fantasy forces him to relinquish nearly everything thatmattered to him throughout the novel, including the vindication of hischaracter, and invites the reader to critique the premises that had informedthe novel from the start. Although this autocritique does not inspire anentirely new version, as in the Salisbury Plain poems, nor is it incorporatedinto the core epiphany of the text, as in Urizen, it profoundly destabilizesthe book, revising it retrospectively in its final move.

From the turn in each of these three texts, one can infer that duringthe mid-1790s there took place a broad autocritique of paranoia whichradicalized it and transformed it into the more self-conscious, and arguablydarker, mood of trauma. Although this latter mood emerged in part as aresponse to actual events, especially the intensifying military confrontationbetween European powers, it also arose in part from a turn in the prioraffective response to similar events. How should one conceive of this turn,at once affective and figural, from one mood into another? The possibilitythat one mood might transform into another by reflecting upon itself, bycarrying out a genuine autocritique, suggests that the turning of mood isan instance of the dialectic. The problem with relying on the Hegelianaccount of the dialectic, however, as Pfau points out, is that ‘mood provesresistant to any dialectical recovery, because it has never staked out any claimto an object in the first place’ (32). Neither the subject nor the object ofa knowledge, never represented definitively for a fully cognitive processing,it cannot partake in the redemptive dialectic of self-consciousness. Yet mood’squasi-cognitive status suggests that one cannot entirely extricate it from themovement of those literary figures that attempt to awaken it in virtualform. A certain dynamic operation akin to the dialectic may thus take placenot on the basis of any formal ground or with any absolute destination,but rather on the virtual ground of the aesthetic. As Pfau argues, the Jenaromantics, particularly Novalis, assert that the aesthetic idea ‘simulates theoperational coherence of reason through a performative staging of thesubject’s development’ (44). Moreover, despite his treatment of aesthetic


Troping Mood 381

self-consciousness as in some sense ‘inimical to [his] overarching systematicinterests’ (67), as Pfau writes, Hegel also argues that the lyric ‘liberates thespirit not from but in feeling’ (Hegel qtd. 67), emphasizes that lyric ‘alwaysreflects on its own medial character as language’ (67), and thus finds in thelyric an aesthetic counterpart to philosophical reflection. Hegel’s accountof poetry, Pfau argues, can be traced back to Hölderlin, who equallyemphasizes poetry’s capacity to realize feeling in an aesthetic artifact, andin his own poetic practice, particularly his ode to Rousseau, aims to meldpoetry and critique, to balance ‘the emotive and rational dimensions ofknowledge’ (72–3). These accounts of lyric allow us to see poetry as feeling’sformal reflection on itself, a reflection that can operate by means of atransferential detour through another. What Hölderlin carries out in relationto Rousseau, I would suggest, Wordsworth, Blake, and Godwin may carryout in relation to the discourses in which their own prior formulations aredeeply embedded.

Nothing in this model of poetry prevents one from conceiving it as aspace for the critical articulation and transformation of mood. If mood isbest captured in the virtual form of the figure, as Pfau argues, then it isaltogether appropriate for Hegel to emphasize that through the lyric, feelingand language can both reflect on themselves. What one need only add isthat one reflection takes place through the other, that lyric presses againstthe limitations of any given mood precisely through its testing the limitationsof a given aesthetic form. Literature’s reflective capacity embeds it ina dialectical process broadly conceived – in a transformative mobility, agenerative turning.

What is gained by tying the affective mobility of mood to the figuralmobility of literary form? One virtue of this approach is to make visible howtoo insistent an emphasis on the self-consistent coherence in articulationsof a given mood may strip it of the volatility or amorphousness that rescuesit from reduction. Mood is irreducible, among other reasons, because itso easily calls upon or flows into other moods; if the concept of mood makespossible a theory of noncoincidence of history with itself, one should alsoinsist on a certain noncoincidence in mood itself, one that would makeit impossible to set each mood apart in a gallery of discrete affects. Hölderlin’sconstructing his lyrical reflection via a detour through Rousseau, and theexemplary autocritiques of Wordsworth, Blake, and Godwin, all suggestthat one can formalize mood through a reflection on the consequences offormalizing another. It seems possible that any given literary text cancapture the transformative movement of mood in the stresses, faultlines,or metamorphoses of its form. Reading literature in this way amplifies itshistoricity, locating it not only in relation to a particular mood but alsoto the array of previous and possible figurations of affect embedded in thatmood, enabling one to rethink literary history not as progress or formaldevelopment, nor indeed as anything ‘accumulatively contextual’, as Pfauargues (7), but as a dialectical reflection on the figuration of affect.

382 Troping Mood


If both mood and trope are mobile in this way, can one limit theirmovement to the era of modernity? Is there a kind of immobile boundaryto the dialectical movement of literature? In Pfau’s account, the primacyof mood emerges when historical transformation exceeds the frameworksthat previously contained it, when it begins to register, in a quasi-cognitivefashion, history’s perpetual missed encounter with the real. But this notionof the loss of certainty, or of tradition, is one of modernity’s self-authorizing,foundational gestures rather than a plausible account of historical transfor-mation (cf. Jameson 34). In this account, modernity encounters the absenceof foundations more directly than any previous era, ironically marking itsdifference through its certainty of the lack of certainty. As a result, it remainsblind to the alternative interpretive possibilities that precede it and subtendit, to its only partial interpretation of structurally necessary dilemmas that itshares with what came before and will come after. By slipping from thecontingent to the transcendental, as accounts of modernity tend to do, orby slipping from a literary figure such as Dasein to claims about the horizonof experience, as Heideggerian philosophy tends to do, one transforms astrong interpretation into a determining context, reinscribing myth in theheart of a supposedly demythologized analysis. One of the many virtues ofRomantic Moods is that it so carefully delineates the mutual implication ofromanticism and modernity. But for that very reason, it raises with unusualforce the question as to whether the task of romantic criticism is to readmodernity within its own terms, however searching they may be, or whetherinstead our task, on the contrary, is to decipher the mystifications in moder-nity’s constructions of itself, to critique the very gestures whereby it reassuresitself of its difference, and to recover a broader, nonmodern history of figuralinterplay of which modernity would be only a recent and partial instance.

Short Biography

David Collings, Professor of English at Bowdoin College, received his Ph.D.at the University of California, Riverside. His initial research examined theconjunction of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and culturalfiguration, on which he published Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics ofCultural Dismemberment ( Johns Hopkins 1994) as well as articles on S. T.Coleridge and John Thelwall. With Michael O’Rourke, he edited a specialissue of Romanticism on the Net on Queer Romanticisms (November 2004–Feburary 2005). In recent years he has worked on the intersection betweenplebeian counterpower, theories of reciprocity and symbolic exchange, theemergence of modern discourses of demographics and political economy,and the Gothic critique of the latter, publishing articles on JeremyBentham and T. R. Malthus, and Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline,and the Political Uncanny, c.1780–1848 (Bucknell, forthcoming 2009). Hiscurrent project focuses on romanticism, secularization, and the problem ofrevolutionary and/or divine violence.


Troping Mood 383

Note

* Correspondence address: 8300 College Station, Brunswick, Maine, United States, 04530.Email: [email protected].

Works Cited

Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. New York, NY: Verso, 2002.Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

UP, 1993.Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1989.Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.

Documents

Troping Mood: Pfau, Wordsworth, and Hegel