The fortunes of literature and how the culture of data is older than we think.
Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with The Connected Condition» author Yohei Igarashi
What’s this book about?
My hope in writing The Connected Condition was to have readers think about British Romantic poetry a little bit differently and in a way that’s suggestive about contemporary concerns. Romantic literature’s distinguishing literary features and motifs, and its very emergence as an artistic movement, have been accounted for in a variety of ways for a very long time: for example, as responses to eighteenth-century poetic style, the French Revolution, or industrialization. I wanted to suggest that the period could be understood in an additional way, as registering the beginnings of the information age, our information age. The Romantics found themselves living with, quite ambivalently, an early version of today’s world of communication, media, and information technologies. My chapter on John Keats, for example, considers how his poetry harbors a tension between broader cultural desires about speedy communication sparked by early telegraphy and the slow reading traditionally associated with ornate, figurative poetic language of the sort that defined Keats’s own literary style.
The opening pages of The Connected Condition reflect on how I’m a slow reader and writer, and the book as a whole considers the ways that the Romantics capitulated to the norms of informational efficiency and speed as much as they criticized them through their writings
What made you want to write it?
When I first started writing what eventually evolved into this book, there was already inspiring work being done on Romanticism and media, print culture, and book history. But I thought there was still plenty more to say on some important matters. To give one example, a lot of work had focused on how authors thought about the relation between orality and printed matter, but I was interested in how one’s inner thoughts are written out by hand. This is something Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a sedulous notebook keeper, was also very interested in. It’s a different examination of the writing process (since writers weren’t typically whispering words directly into the ears of printers), and also somewhat closer to how we silently type out our thoughts on our computers, oftentimes bypassing speech. It also took me into the obsessive world of early modern and Romantic-era shorthand systems; their elaborate coding systems reminded me a lot of logographic scripts like Japanese kanji and, at other times, computer programming. I feel lucky to have worked with the Text Technologies series in this regard, since the book’s main concerns fit very well under that heading.
What’s the most unexpected thing you learned?
I think several things, but maybe the most unexpected topic I pursued, and learned about, was about taxation during the long eighteenth century and the Romantic era—particularly stamp taxes (which don’t have to do with postal stamps, and deal instead with stamps that validated business and legal documents and appeared on certain consumer items like hair powder) and death duties (which are taxes on bequests, and happen to combine the two proverbial certainties in life). I got immersed in all this because I wanted to understand better William Wordsworth’s government appointment as a tax collector: biographers and a few scholars have treated this second, non-literary job, but no one had looked deeply into the actual tax laws that shaped this job or the details of how Wordsworth processed fiscal data on paper forms. This all sounds very boring—taxes, after all—but it was surprisingly fascinating. In thinking about both the Romantic era and today, I found it exciting to try to understand what kinds of effects a culture of data has on literature.
What was the writing process like?
I usually amass many pages of research notes in a single document, after which I create a series of successive, distilling documents that slowly get closer to the end result. When I’m stuck, I try to get out of the word processing mindset by writing and outlining by hand. There’s more but that’s probably enough. The opening pages of The Connected Condition reflect on how I’m a slow reader and writer, and the book as a whole considers the ways that the Romantics capitulated to the norms of informational efficiency and speed as much as they criticized them through their writings. So there’s some working through going on in the book. There’s a Zadie Smith essay I like called “The I Who Is Not Me,” in which she discusses how she can work through her preoccupations through a variety of fictional characters whose identities can be very different from hers, while seemingly autobiographical writers are, of course, being highly fictitious. She’s talking about the writing of fiction, but her comments are applicable to different kinds of literary criticism too. The first mode that she describes struck me as one way to understand how I approach these canonical authors.
Start reading The Connected Condition »
Comments