A Book Explores the Concept of Community in the Romantic Period
Joseph Albernaz’s Common Measures revisits the lives of such writers as William Blake and the Wordsworths.
What happens to the experience of community when communal life collapses? The Romantic period's upheaval cast both traditional communal organizations of life and outgrowths of the new revolutionary age into crisis.
In Common Measures, Joseph Albernaz, an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature, argues that Romantic writers articulate a vital conception of groundless community, while following this idea through its aesthetic, ecological, political, and philosophical registers into the present. Amid the violent expropriation of the commons, Romantic writers—including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Friedrich Hölderlin, and the revolutionary abolitionist Robert Wedderburn—reimagined the forms of their own lives through literature to conceive community as groundless, a disposition toward radically open forms of sharing without recourse to any collective identity.
Both a poetic and ethical stance, groundless community describes an everyday form of social discourse that is against the enclosures of property and identity, binding people to the movements of the earth. Unearthing Romanticism's intersections with the history of communism and the general strike, Albernaz also demonstrates how Romantic literature's communal imagination reverberates through later theories of community.
Albernaz discusses the book with Columbia News, along with what books line his shelves, and what he’s now working on and teaching.
How did this book come about?
I wrote this book to understand how writers in the Romantic period (the decades around 1800) approached the question of community in times of crisis—times when community seems disrupted or even impossible, whether from war, colonialism and slavery, political disappointment in revolution, the enclosure (or privatization) of common lands, or simply the loss of faith in traditional institutions and sources of common life.
As I investigated further, I found a vision of community in writers like William Blake and John Clare, which anticipated 20th-century-and-21st-century ideas of what I call a groundless community—one that is not based in any common identity, essence, hierarchy, or necessary order. The real lightbulb moment came when I realized that these later thinkers of community were themselves quite often taking cues from the Romantics.
Can you share some examples from the book of how Romantic writers reimagined their own lives through literature to conceive community as groundless?
One example I look at in the book is the writing of the siblings William and Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1800, they moved to the Grasmere Valley in England’s Lake District to make a new home together, and I explore how their writing—William’s poetry, Dorothy’s journal, and a few of her poems, too—gestures toward a kind of dwelling in common, with others and with the earth, which is inevitably fractured and fragmentary.
In this way, in their lives and work, they were rethinking the idea of domesticity, and what making (and sharing) a home might be. It is groundless, in my terms, because it refuses any kind of holism, any notion of a home, family, or community as a closed organic whole. Their idea of community does not take its cues from any normative notions of what a community (or a home) should be: It is not grounded in some abstract idea, principle, or transcendent vision. Instead, the common life becomes an open set of ordinary gestures, habits, and affects of sharing what can never be finished, whole, or incomplete; instead, their communal existence is a disposition that is open to the edges of life in all its singularity. And this includes their interactions with the landscape and nature, with animals (like a bird’s nest that is built on the window of their cottage), and rhythms of the earth. As William Wordsworth wrote: “Solitude is not / where these things are.”
What books might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
This is a tough question, because I am something of a bibliomaniac (that’s one level beyond even bibliophile!), and I have books on many different subjects. Here are a few random selections on my shelf in my office in Philosophy Hall: An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages by John Fleming, which, welcomely, is exactly what its title suggests. Da Poesia by Hilda Hilst, the collected poems of this strange, scintillating Brazilian writer.
Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances by Mohamed Abdou, a fantastic, creative book on the affinities between certain ideas and practices in Islamic theology and history, and aspects of anarchism. Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire, a selection of poems by one of the great writers and thinkers of the 20th century, beautifully translated by Gregson Davis, an eminent classicist from Antigua, and a friend and mentor of my own mentor, Bill Race, George L. Paddison Professor of Classics, emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
What did you teach this semester?
An undergraduate seminar on Romanticism and the concept of freedom, as well as the research methods class taken by English and Comparative Literature majors working on their senior essay. Next semester, I’ll be teaching a new course on the Haitian Revolution, which I’m looking forward to.
What are you working on now?
Too many things! A lot of small projects including a few translations. The next big thing is a book project on calendars, festivals, and the temporality of literature and revolution.