The Long 18th Century Seminar will meet with Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster University) to discuss her paper, "A Funny Thing: The Undisciplined Eighteenth Century."

1727 saw the publication of Peri Bathous: Or, of the Art of Sinking in Poetry by Martin Scriblerus, both a pen name for Alexander Pope in this instance and a synecdoche for the coterie of writers known as the Scriblerus Club. A satiric manual for the writing of terrible verse, Peri Bathous offers to lead writers “the gentle down-hill way to the Bathos; the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra, of true Modern Poesy!” To this day, bathos continues to refer to a particular kind of literary failure: when a text aims for some lofty, serious affect—awe, pathos, veneration—and moves the reader instead to laughter and ridicule.

Drawing on my forthcoming book A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined, this talk reads Peri Bathous alongside the Scriblerians’ earlier play Three Hours After Marriage (1717) to posit the early eighteenth-century bathetic mode as a precursor to what Jack Halberstam calls “the queer art of failure.” I aim in particular to vindicate the play’s character Phoebe Clinket, object of the Scriblerians’ gendered contempt and an early, earnest practitioner of bathos. I do so not by making a case for the unrecognized “dignity” of her poetry, but by arguing that the world needs to hold space for bad poetry and people’s “unreasonable” attachments to it. By refusing to discipline her “funniness” through satirical reactions, we make it possible to honor what Phoebe describes as the “poetical Itch” that draws us away from normative arrangements and attaches us to the world, and to each other, differently.

Coffee will be available at 9:30 am (PT). All EMSI events are free and open to the public.