Marshall Grossman Lecture Series: Daniel Shore, "Was it for this? Literary Influence in the Digital Archive"
Marshall Grossman Lecture Series: Daniel Shore, "Was it for this? Literary Influence in the Digital Archive"
ABSTRACT:
In seeking to revise our accounts of literary influence this talk takes as its subject the well-known phrase that became the seed of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: “Was it for this.” The sources of this phrase have received a great deal of scholarly attention, including, in 1975, a notable exchange in the Times Literary Supplement in which a slate of renowned Romanticists proposed a dozen possible poets, including Pope, Milton, Shenstone, Harington, and Virgil, as Wordsworth’s originals. Yet the digital archive allows us to discover not ten or twenty, but more than a thousand new uses of this epic formula prior to Wordsworth. From Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s “quod hoc… erat” into English in 1557, through John Harington’s repurposing of the phrase in his introduction to the Orlando Furioso of 1591, to the publication of The Prelude in 1850, one would be hard pressed to find a writer who did not use the phrase.
I argue that searchable archives allow influence studies to turn from the local task of source-hunting to the systematic project of reassembling literary networks of diffusion modeled on the “actor networks” of the sociologists Bruno Latour and John Law. Considered as part of a network of diffusion, a poet like Wordsworth is but one node, one (admittedly consequential) actor, among thousands. “Was it for this” spread so widely for a few reasons: its generic links to classical epic, its inclusion in the standard grammar school curriculum, its thematic links to Bildung (spiritual growth and education), and indeed its portable syntactic form (“it” and “this” can point to almost anything, and in the two centuries preceding The Prelude they nearly do). The ubiquity of “Was it for this” may at first seem to suggest that Wordsworth was merely using a commonplace, but I show instead that the very notion of the “commonplace,” as currently used by scholars, mystifies the actual, material networks of literary exchange.
Daniel Shore is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. His research and teaching focus on the literature of the Renaissance, with a special focus on the works of John Milton. His first book, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, was published by Cambridge in 2012, and he has published articles on early modern literature and digital humanities in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, and Early Modern Literary Studies. His second book project, Cyberformalism, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.
ABSTRACT:
In seeking to revise our accounts of literary influence this talk takes as its subject the well-known phrase that became the seed of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: “Was it for this.” The sources of this phrase have received a great deal of scholarly attention, including, in 1975, a notable exchange in the Times Literary Supplement in which a slate of renowned Romanticists proposed a dozen possible poets, including Pope, Milton, Shenstone, Harington, and Virgil, as Wordsworth’s originals. Yet the digital archive allows us to discover not ten or twenty, but more than a thousand new uses of this epic formula prior to Wordsworth. From Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s “quod hoc… erat” into English in 1557, through John Harington’s repurposing of the phrase in his introduction to the Orlando Furioso of 1591, to the publication of The Prelude in 1850, one would be hard pressed to find a writer who did not use the phrase.
I argue that searchable archives allow influence studies to turn from the local task of source-hunting to the systematic project of reassembling literary networks of diffusion modeled on the “actor networks” of the sociologists Bruno Latour and John Law. Considered as part of a network of diffusion, a poet like Wordsworth is but one node, one (admittedly consequential) actor, among thousands. “Was it for this” spread so widely for a few reasons: its generic links to classical epic, its inclusion in the standard grammar school curriculum, its thematic links to Bildung (spiritual growth and education), and indeed its portable syntactic form (“it” and “this” can point to almost anything, and in the two centuries preceding The Prelude they nearly do). The ubiquity of “Was it for this” may at first seem to suggest that Wordsworth was merely using a commonplace, but I show instead that the very notion of the “commonplace,” as currently used by scholars, mystifies the actual, material networks of literary exchange.
Daniel Shore is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. His research and teaching focus on the literature of the Renaissance, with a special focus on the works of John Milton. His first book, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, was published by Cambridge in 2012, and he has published articles on early modern literature and digital humanities in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, and Early Modern Literary Studies. His second book project, Cyberformalism, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tawes Hall