Well, I don’t plan to blog live from session to session here at SHARP, but I’ll probably check in now and again. For those most loyal to the g.h.w. experience, a rough agenda for tomorrow Wednesday is attached in the extended entry. You can also consult the whole conference program for yourself.
KC to SLC; SLC to LAX. Supershuttle to Claremont. I should have flown into Ontario airport instead, but I had a nice conversation in the shuttle with a few people who live in the area. Saving time isn’t everything. Lots of smog over LA (no surprise). The air looks like dirty bathwater. Here in Claremont, though, it’s beautiful. Scripps College has an absolutely gorgeous campus. And ethernet in my dorm room.
But I’m off to get something to eat and to drink something iced and caffeinated. SHARP officially starts tomorrow. I’ve gone over the program and selected what I want to attend. I’ll share with you later tonight, I think.
Tomorrow I leave for the SHARP conference at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where it looks like the weather will be hot, but not humid. I feel pretty good about my paper, in which I position John Wesley’s monthly Arminian Magazine (initiated in 1778) as an interesting case study for considering the institutional and social milieu in which religious publications were produced, distributed, and consumed in eighteenth-century England.
Working on this paper has forced me to reconsider some of the key assumptions I was holding regarding the unifying power of print and specifically of periodicals. Benedict Anderson attributes a great deal of this sort of power to newspapers, but the example of Wesley’s magazine argues against this assumption. By endorsing and vehemently propagating dissenting opinions, periodicals can fragment readers as much as they might unify. Much work remains for me to consider religious affiliation alongside nationalism. This is a good thing.
Meanwhile, I’m also thinking ahead to the paper I’ll be giving at the annual meeting of the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Chicago this November. My paper is entitled “Comic Anxiety and Anxious Comedy: Anti-Methodist Satire on Stage, in Print, and in Person.”
“Anxiety” is one of those words that everyone seems to be using lately with regard to new media, new technologies, and their impact. It’s also used by those who wrote about the impact of print in the eighteenth century and about the reaction to Methodism. But what exactly does the word mean? I’d like to interrogate this term and see if we might complicate what we think we mean by our use of it. And what relationship does it have to laughter?
Among the definitions in The Oxford English Dictionary for “anxious” is the following:
And the OED definition of “anxiety” includes these:
What I find interesting is the mixture of a positive and negative; hope that something will not happen joined perhaps with hope that it will. I’ve really only just begun to think about this issue, and I would appreciate any recommendations for further reading.
Recently discovered this genre of candy, in which the traditional sweet, hard candy of a lollipop is covered with a spicy chili pepper powder. Very good, but perhaps not for everyone. So far I’ve tried watermelon and mango.
“My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy … [T]he creation of these artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces; but … once created, they became ‘modular,’ capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide array of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments” (4).
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Press, 1991. Revised Edition.