Tobias Menely

Each day in the classroom is an experiment because, no matter how much I prepare, what unfolds when I sit down with students to discuss a text is, and ought be, unforeseeable. Interpretative openness and an aptitude for listening are central features of my pedagogy; they are also its aim. When students leave my classes, I wish to have contributed something to their capacity to think through complex problems, particularly those having to do with language, and to do so in dialogue with others. I love teaching, however, because of the possibility of being surprised: by an ingenious argument about the narrative technique in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, by a novel interpretation of the status of objects in sentimental literature, or by the question a student asked six years ago, about the origins of social obligation, that has oriented my scholarship since.

Particularly in introductory courses, my first aim is to defamiliarize the act of reading. Students arrive in English classes with a habit of reading quickly and haphazardly, focused only on general content. I remember my own bewildered attempt, in college, to read poetry at my habitual reading speed and my delight the first time I read a poem, Stevens's "Sunday Morning," slowly. As students come to understand the formal technologies that produce literary meaning--the contours of character and narrative, the structures of prosody and metaphor, the strategies of rhetoric--we then can ask questions about how texts participate in the social world, how they reflect, constitute, and critique human cultures. Even in introductory courses, I believe it is essential to situate texts within their historical context, to self-consciously establish genealogies rather than universalities.

One of my ambitions as a professor is to make the long eighteenth century appear as exciting to my students as it appears to me. Generating enthusiasm means attending to aspects of the eighteenth century that strike us as familiar: anxiety about the unintended consequences of global trade and imperial aspiration, faith in the march of progress, a consuming interest in the world of things, which paradoxically underscores a new emphasis on the individual's interior spaces. It means also noticing what we find strange about the period, such as its providentialism, neoclassicism, and sentimental culture of public affect.

I design challenging courses because I want my students to confront open-ended problems. Intellectual maturity requires the capacity to occupy spaces of uncertainty and complexity. This is why in I stress that I do not have all the answers and why I make it a practice to share with students the problems I study in my own research. I encourage my students to enjoy good writing, to read as a way to cultivate the self, and to gain confidence in their own words. I also push them to sharpen their skepticism and to recognize how ideology accomplishes its work in narrative, in metaphor, in a text's inclusions and exclusions. I approach the teaching of literature with the assumption that liberal education has a place for passion and critical analysis, self-knowledge and social responsibility, pleasure and doggedness.

My own work examines the production of collective affect and obligation in eighteenth-century Britain. I am interested in imaginative literature's role in constituting emotional, ethical, and legal communities that traverse geographical distance and encompass different forms of life. The eighteenth century is a rich era in which to investigate the emergence of modern forms of communal belonging; in its expanding print culture and novel venues for public participation scholars have located the foundations of secular nationalism and humanitarianism. Additionally, this is the period when Britons came to see polite letters as a primary source of emotional instruction and social sympathy, which is why literature offers a particularly important source for any cultural history of social concern. My scholarship is oriented by Foucault's remark that "every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history," and it follows the Scottish moral philosophers in locating such sentiments in concrete social and aesthetic practices rather than abstract and universal ideals.

I am currently working on a book manuscript, titled Sympathy's Kingdom: Sentimental Culture and the Birth of Animal Rights, which examines an unprecedented conversation, in eighteenth-century British culture, about the place of animals in human community. Sympathy’s Kingdom reads sentimentality as a rhetorical practice that radically reconceived civil relationships and obligations by disclosing the voices and interests of marginalized social subjects. Because it assigns shared feeling the role of generating community, I argue, the sentimental mode was particularly effective at destabilizing those orthodox assumptions that denied animals the benefits of communal membership by allocating rights based on a uniquely human capacity for reason. Linking ethical status with interests arising from sensation, and ethical responsibility with sympathetic receptivity, a sentimental literature replete with animal presences forged unsettling cross-species identifications. Animal advocates—whose ranks included Anglican divines, Whig parliamentarians, and Jacobin radicals; moral philosophers, gentleman landowners, and urbane poets—sought to incorporate nonhumans into the moral and political imaginary by conveying their interests as sentient beings and their affective proximity to humans. They drew on a rhetoric of sensibility which transformed the body into a semiotic medium, offering a means of representing animal existence in the virtual public sphere and paving the way for an emergent conception of rights-bearing personhood.

While Sympathy’s Kingdom excavates the origins of animal rights, it also contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of sentimentality, a significant literary phenomenon and a distinctively modern way of imagining collective identity. The culture of sentiment was a media culture, in which a growing audience of readers participated in a new kind of public life, oriented around disempowered victims whose suffering was made visible, and thus socially meaningful, as aesthetic spectacle. The sentimental mode disclosed the asymmetrical relations and social contradictions associated with commercial capitalism, imperial expansion, and the rise of liberal democracy. It was closely allied with new practices of philanthropy and social activism, changing patterns of consumption and entertainment, and the ideological imperatives of middle-class self-definition. By attending to the rhetorical designs and modes of advocacy at work in sentimental literature, I discover formal sophistication and intricately balanced social investments in literary texts—poems by Thomson, Gay, Pope, Somerville, Cowper, Barbauld, and Robinson; novels by Sterne, Mackenzie, and Sarah Scott—that twentieth-century critics have derided for mawkishness and moral instrumentality. This is the era, after all, in which imagined community came to be understood in markedly literary terms, as the figurative, perceptual, and emotive bonds cultivated in the act of reading. While recent scholarship on sentimentality has exposed its disciplinary and exclusionary functions, I show how the sentimental mode proliferated emotional affiliations and disrupted hegemonic logics of personhood, most radically by figuring a subject who is not necessarily a human. The unsettling social and political implications of these new affective identifications provide an ideological explanation for sentimentality’s pejoration, its precipitous loss of cultural authority starting in the 1790s.

Jacques Derrida considers the problem of the animal to be “decisive” in modern thought, “the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined.” He observes that modern, liberal conceptions of sovereignty and political subjectivity are premised on an absolute division between humans and other animals, and yet he points out that nonhumans may be recognized as active participants in social networks, subject to norms of collective obligation. Derrida suggests that in order to think about the history of ethical and political community—about identity and identification, rights and responsibilities—it is worthwhile, perhaps even necessary, to take notice of the place of the animal. Sympathy’s Kingdom considers the contested and cathected status of animals during the long eighteenth century, a relatively uncharted era in the cultural history of our relations with other creatures, in order to show how a powerful rhetoric of sympathetic affiliation operated in the Georgian public sphere, underwriting the growing political currency of rights discourse. As a conception of justice rooted in sentience itself, eighteenth-century sentimentality, I find, comprised a universalism that reveals the partiality of even the most fully realized humanism.

My scholarship responds to the difficulty we have in thinking through the complex history of social concern, particularly in an academic milieu that takes for granted the humanistic obligations that drive cultural criticism. We tend to be more adept in exercising our deeply felt social responsibilities in our scholarship and teaching than in explaining their historical and epistemological roots. As Thomas Haskell has suggested, the emergence of humanitarian sensibility, in its philosophical, literary, institutional, and political forms, remains so perplexing a historiographic problem because it runs up against the hermeneutic limitations of Marxist ideology critique, poststructuralist models of power, and the liberal discourse of self-interest associated with Hobbes and Locke. Social feeling is always imbricated in larger structures of authority, such as bourgeois class interest and nationalism, but is not reducible to false consciousness or social control. Its history, my work suggests, is also one of affective conventions and norms, of imaginative technologies and media, and of new perceptions of causality and obligation.

Interests

Literature and Culture of the Long Eighteenth Century; Emotion, Ethics, and Humanitarianism; Animal Studies; Postcolonial Theory and Empire