Vanishing Points: The Heterotopia of the Romantic Book

Abstract This article aims to establish a set of interdisciplinary practices to identify the uniqueness of Romantic books in particular and bibliographic change more generally. It argues that when we take into account the book at a synaesthetic level, we see a new relationship to the book emerging during the Romantic period that converges around the production of "vanishing points." Reading is no longer framed as something utopian, as in a medieval or early-modern tradition (from Dante to More), but instead as heterotopian, as the production of some outside within. Heterotopia, I argue, becomes the condition through which new kinds of knowledge formation as well new kinds of mediation become possible, up to and including the non-book. The Romantic book marks the beginning of the theorization of the book's end. Things liberate one from surveillance and … observation frees one from suspicion. Sciences that are not acquainted with objects can only rely on sleuthing and policing. (Michel Serres, The Five Senses 42) Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jon Klancher for the thought-provoking exchange on Romantic book culture that proved an inspiration for this piece. Notes This talk is intended as a resumé of my past and current research as well as new work coming out of the field by a number of scholars. For a recent showcase of such work, see the forthcoming special issue of RaVoN devoted to Romantic print cultures (Piper and Sachs). I am drawing here on the work of Lisa Gitelman, who makes this argument for the history of media more generally. I want to add here just how much my thinking about the lacuna in the Romantic book is indebted to Jon Klancher's The Making of English Reading Audiences, a work that was really the first to explicate the implications of the crisis of address that marked the growing schism between reader and writer in the Romantic period's increasingly commercial bibliographic environment. That schism, I want to argue, is reinscribed in the bibliographic poetics of the hollow that comes to characterize the Romantic book. For further consideration of the intersections of modern commercialism and the Romantic book, see Ferris and Keen; Franta. For recent work on the genre of the view, tourism, and Romantic poetry, see Fulford. For a history of the Romantic horizon line, see Koschorke. And for work on the relationship between technology and the picturesque, see Broglio. An earlier version ("preprint") of this essay, including illustrations, can be found at the author's website: http://piperlab.mcgill.ca/articles.html. As Gilpin writes in his essays on the picturesque, "It descends not to the minutiae of objects. The fringed bank of the river – the Gothic ornaments of the abbey – the chasms, and the fractures of the rock, and castle – and every little object along the vale, it pretends not to delineate with exactness" (87–88). For a discussion of the diagram as it relates to Foucault, see Deleuze (21–38).

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