{"id":46955,"date":"2024-02-05T19:44:32","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T19:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=46955"},"modified":"2024-08-09T07:40:55","modified_gmt":"2024-08-09T11:40:55","slug":"fass-in-a-flash-with-associate-dean-dr-paul-keen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2024\/fass-in-a-flash-with-associate-dean-dr-paul-keen\/","title":{"rendered":"FASS in a Flash – with Associate Dean Dr. Paul Keen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n FASS in a Flash – with Associate Dean Dr. Paul Keen\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Lightning Interviews with Our Community<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Dr. Paul Keen<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Name:<\/strong> Paul Keen
Academic Title:<\/strong> Associate Dean, Professor
Email: <\/strong>paul_keen@carleton.ca<\/a>
FASS Affiliation(s):<\/strong> Department of English Language and Literature<\/a>, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would you explain your research to someone with no experience in your field?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My research focuses on a set of connected debates that people in Britain were having about the meaning of literature in the Romantic period. Most of these debates sprang from much wider issues such as the political struggle for democracy that spilled over into Britain in the years after the French Revolution, and questions about what it meant to be a professional author in the midst of Britain’s accelerating shift into a modern commercial nation driven by fashion, credit, and conspicuous consumption as a status marker in an unstable world. These changes were compounded by related pressures unleashed by highly political debates about modern science, the politics of empire, women’s rights, and education. All of these issues foregrounded questions about literature that are strikingly current in our own day: How should we even define the word “literature”? What use was it? What social role or public value should it have? Who should be reading and writing what, and how much should this be regulated?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My most recent project is related to this. It explores the arguments that advocates were making for the public value of the humanities in the early nineteenth century, which is the time when modern humanities programs (including the first courses in English literature) were being set up in Britain’s new universities. These advocates’ arguments are especially interesting because, like our own age’s obsession with STEM, this was a utilitarian age, so the claims they developed on behalf of the liberal arts still ring true today!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What first sparked your interest in your discipline and research?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got hooked by a fourth-year undergraduate course on the 1790s poets (mainly William Wordsworth<\/a> and Samuel Taylor Coleridge<\/a>) which highlighted the powerful influence of the French Revolution on their writing. Like most of the brightest thinkers of their generation, they were obsessed with it. William Wordsworth wrote a lot of radical poetry in his early days, and went to live in France during the Revolution (as did many other writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams). Coleridge dropped out of university and became a radical writer and public speaker. I was intrigued by the energizing mix of poetry and radical politics, idealism and activism that energized their generation. They believed that the arts could be a powerful force for reshaping society in better ways. In some ways, it was a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, especially because of the galvanizing effect of reformers’ opposition to Britain’s war with the new government in France, which they denounced as an unjust reactionary war, much the way that protestors rejected the Vietnam war in the 60s. It’s not hard to find parallels with our own day as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s one fact about your research area that most people are surprised to learn?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that most people are surprised by is the same one that surprised me most as I got into my research: that people thought of literature, not as the fairly narrow aesthetic category that we do today, but really as the late eighteenth-century version of social media. William Godwin, who was one of the leading writers of the day defined literature as “the diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion, whether written or oral.” That’s completely different than how we think of it today but it was actually pretty standard at the time. It didn’t mean that poetry and other types of creative writing were less valued; it makes the arts more interesting because it reminds us that they were part of a much larger set of social and political forms of debate that comprised what they thought of as the public sphere. Again, I was struck by just how strongly all of this resonated with our own debates about social media today!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s probably the same misconception that we all have about history generally, and it’s one that we never fully manage to work our way out of. We tend to think of these earlier ages as somehow “traditional” or old-fashioned, as though they were all 200 years old and wearing hopelessly out-of-date clothing, just because a couple of centuries passed since then. We sometimes approach writers from these earlier ages like they were born and raised inside the Norton anthology, and were writing their poetry and novels for our university English classes. It’s rare to remember that, in every age, people were living in the present tense. Like us, they were living in the most modern age that had ever existed and (again like us) one that was dealing with unprecedented changes like revolution, imperialism, urbanization, and the effects of capitalism. A lot of the writers that we study today were both brilliant and confused, arrogant and idealistic, political and professionally ambitious. They were trying to think their way through extraordinary questions and contradictions, and to use their writing as a way to intervene in all of these things, but without the benefit of hindsight or any kind of instruction manual. That sense of their modernity, which can be hard to fully embrace, makes historical study far more compelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you have a favourite class to teach? <\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love teaching courses in Romantic literature, for all of the reasons that I’ve been discussing above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you have any current or upcoming academic projects that you’re excited about?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My most recent book, Imagining What We Know: A Defense of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age<\/a>, explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favour of the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures that dismissed the arts as self-indulgent pursuits incapable of addressing real-world problems. Its focus reflects the ways that similar pressures today have foregrounded all over again the question of how to make the case for the value of the humanities. Evidence of these problems surrounds us, but the core of my argument is that these pressures also constitute an important opportunity: a chance to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, their potential benefits to contemporary life, and how we might channel these benefits back into the larger society. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society \u2013 its various pasts and its possible futures \u2013 and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must ultimately be situated. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way: knowing more about past debates will provide a crucial basis for moving forward as universities, and the humanities in particular, position themselves to respond to new challenges during an age of radical change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My current project, The Joke of Literature: A History of the Essay in English, tracks the history of that most elusive of genres, \u201cthe essay,\u201d over the three centuries since its meteoric rise in popularity after the appearance of The Spectator in 1711. G. K. Chesterton\u2019s description of the essay as \u201cthe joke\u201d of literature typified the genre\u2019s uncertain history, always on the margins of those more ambitious forms of writing that could be embraced as \u201cliterary.\u201d But this apparent limitation may help to explain both the essay\u2019s enduring popularity across different historical periods and the renewed critical interest in the genre\u2019s unruly status as \u201can experiment\u201d or \u201ca try-on,\u201d as Montaigne called it, whose provisional nature unsettled the possibility of categorical certainties. Flaunting essays\u2019 association with fragmentary and discontinuous writing that traded in the quotidian and the ephemeral, essay writers reveled in its democratic ethos, contrasting the immediacy of their everyday focus with the obscurity of more ponderous works that remained largely irrelevant to most readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meet Associate Dean Dr. Paul Keen!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,90,44],"tags":[801,802,267,800],"class_list":["post-46955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-fass-news","category-for-students","tag-art","tag-culture","tag-english","tag-spotlight"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46955"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47470,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46955\/revisions\/47470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}