<i>Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention</i>. Lily Gurton-Wachter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. x+270.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWatchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Lily Gurton-Wachter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. x+270.Carmen Faye MathesCarmen Faye MathesUniversity of British Columbia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the debate over the history of attention, its limits and power, a familiar place to begin might be Michel Foucault’s “panopticism”: that process through which observation became a disciplinary mechanism requiring of its officers nothing more or less than the illusion of constant vigilance.1 That those in need of watching must feel themselves always watched was the means of a system in which actually being ever watchful was never an end. For Foucault, the panopticon modeled instead “a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” Not just a chilling architectural marvel, it was also a “figure of political technology” that turned perceived surveillance and the threat of punishment toward the self-regulation of a citizenry just as effectively as it did that of prisoners.2Such an atmosphere of disciplinary watchfulness Lily Gurton-Wachter finds both called for and resisted in her excellent first book, Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. For late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons, Gurton-Wachter demonstrates how war abroad and the risk of war at home led to an atmosphere of heightened, militarized attention that demanded vigilance from soldier and citizen alike. When the “attention!” of military manuals began to resonate with the exhortations of alarmist broadsides and political pamphlets, mobilizing Britons’ attentions en masse meant casting every civilian as a “half-soldier” (9). In 1803, for instance, “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” challenged war volunteers to solve rebus games; through close scrutiny of visual clues on the page, readers practiced the concentration necessary to spot real French invaders (34–35). This decentralization of the responsibility to keep watch, from authorities to the population in general, Gurton-Wachter tells us, moved disciplined attentiveness off the military exercise field and into the forms and functions of the attention’s “affective, social, cognitive, theological, and ethical postures” (9, 11).Against this disciplinary imperative Gurton-Wachter positions Romanticism—a literary-theoretical movement built on revolutionary energies and ideals—as “[seeking] to derail” citizen-wide attentiveness and “reappropriate a mode of attention that, it turned out, was always more mobile and erratic than the state wanted it to be anyway” (10). Examining the ways that Romantic writers respond to, participate in, and challenge wartime alertness, Gurton-Wachter traces a “poetics of attention” that “pivots on the possibility that how we watch might alter what we notice” (11). That the how, for Gurton-Wachter, often depends on subjects’ embodied, affective apprehensions, reflects the disciplinary breadth of her approach. From her opening chapter, “The Physiology of Reading,” to discussions of Elizabeth Hamilton’s educational tracts and the geological observations of Charlotte Smith, a thoroughgoing strength of this book is Gurton-Wachter’s capacity for describing the poetics of attention without fixing it, preserving the “erratic” nature of its Romantic reappropriation. Her discussion of William Blake, for instance, discovers a theory of “writing and reading poetry in which attention is both relaxed and vigorous, divided and undiminished,” while William Wordsworth is “obsessed with what happens during the intervals between acts of attention” (54, 86). John Keats, in his Hyperion poem, “evokes a wartime watchfulness that is self-consciously idle, deliberately fearless, and yet still hurts,” and which Gurton-Wachter brilliantly reads through Keats’s figures of “the mutilations of war with those of time”: the broken bodies of soldiers, fragmented and fractured sculptures, and the break in history that is marked by the Greek gods’ fall from power (143).Sensitive to the historicity of such diffuse and varied sensations of watchfulness, Watchwords joins a host of recent scholarship for which Romantic texts register a sense or feeling of history, especially Mary Favret’s investigation of the affective dimensions of “war at a distance” (2010), but also the paranoia and fear of John Bugg’s Five Long Winters (2013) and Alan Liu’s inaugural Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989).3 That Gurton-Wachter does so with an eye to Romantic attention’s “oscillations” and “lapses” suggests the subtlety necessary to make such arguments, and which her insightful close readings deftly realize (193). In her closing meditation, “Just Looking,” Gurton-Wachter pries loose our own literary critical attentions from their objects, reconsidering a tendency to “take sides” (and to encourage our students to learn to take sides) as a reductive praxis that replaces the need to think with the obligation to choose (186). Offering “just looking” as an impersonal, nonacquisitive, and necessarily imperfect form of critical attention, Gurton-Wachter’s final suggestion is that what we pay attention to when we read and write about war might be transformed by a Romantic commitment to exploring how we keep watch.Notes1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 195–230.2. Ibid., 205, 250.3. Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton University Press, 2010); John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2013); Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford University Press, 1989). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 2November 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693157HistoryPublished online June 16, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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