Here is the proposal for the panel, “Narrating Value in the Long Eighteenth Century,” which includes summaries of the three papers:<\/p>\n
Whether we trace debates over the relationship between aesthetic, economic, and moral value back to Plato\u2019s expulsion of the poets from the Republic or forward to the special cluster in the January 2012 PMLA<\/em>, \u201cEconomic, Finance, Capital, and Literature,\u201d value remains a central category that animates our disputes and justifies (or fails to justify) the work we do.\u00a0 \u00a0This panel seeks to further these inquiries by focusing on a time and place foundational to ideas of value that continue to shape our understanding and practices\u2014the Long Eighteenth Century in Britain and its colonies.\u00a0 As Mary Poovey and many others have recently established, this is where and when new institutions of credit and debt circulate new ways of valuing persons and objects that make possible imperial expansion and commercial society.\u00a0 These socioeconomic changes were themselves mediated, nurtured, and critiqued by emerging discourses of value\u2014chief among them, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and political economy.\u00a0 Binding those discourses together were new ways of valuing narrative itself, from emergent genres \u00a0(\u201cit-narratives\u201d; Enlightenment historiography; \u00a0the historical novel) to new modes of claiming narrative authority and inculcating narrative knowledge (reviews; professorships in rhetoric and belles lettres). \u00a0This panel excavates these histories and their legacies by approaching representative narratives of value, from 1) an effort to promote colonization in 1730s Virginia to 2) debates in 1790s London print culture over the expertise necessary to grasp the financial system to 3) the British Enlightenment\u2019s analogizing of ethical and aesthetic value as unwittingly re-inscribed by Hannah Arendt, posing a challenge to revisionist accounts too quick to undervalue it.<\/p>\n Our discussion begins toward the start of the Long Eighteenth Century with an investigation of the unique role narrative plays in establishing the value of the colonial enterprise.\u00a0 In \u201cWilliam Byrd\u2019s Hard Sell: History, Fiction, and the Making of the Global-Financial Plantation<\/strong>,\u201d Rob McLoone takes up the work of William Byrd II, the heir and only son of one of Virginia\u2019s wealthiest planters, frequent trans-Atlantic voyager, and a long-time resident of London who represented the interests of the planter elite.\u00a0 In texts such as his History of<\/em> the 1727 dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina, The Progress to the Mines<\/em>, and Journey to the Land of Eden<\/em>, Byrd sought not only to amuse his cosmopolitan audience or fashion a \u201cCreole\u201d self but also to invite investment in Virginia\u2019s plantation society by countering the view of the plantations as places of debt, violence, and misrule.\u00a0 In the wake of the \u201cFinancial Revolution\u201d of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Byrd went beyond quantifiable measurements such as lines on a map and the price of goods, pegging the value of colonization to the mobile relationships, structured associations, and managed dialogues that he believed made plantation space truly valuable.\u00a0 He is one of the first to envision the \u201cglobal-financial plantation\u201d\u2014its emergence in visual and written media as well as in the material relationships and labor practices that coalesced across colonial plantation spaces during these decades.<\/p>\n We then move from Byrd\u2019s informed financial amateurism to the rise of the financial expert.\u00a0 In \u201cExperts, Intellectual, and Financial Controversy in the 1790s,\u201d Alexander Dick<\/strong> takes up the Act of Parliament that prevented British citizens from converting banknotes into gold to reveal battles over the expertise necessary to comprehend the financial system (a topic revivified by the Crash of 2008).\u00a0 While the 1797 suspension of payments has recently become a touchstone for important scholarly accounts of Lyrical Ballads<\/em>, Pride and Prejudice<\/em>, and other texts, Dick departs from their unifying claim that narrative difficulty is homologous to monetary value.\u00a0 He focuses instead on the overlooked figure of the financial expert: \u00a0Outside the horizontal relationships that are supposed to characterize the public sphere and yet possessing the expertise necessary to free, knowledgeable debate, the expert is essential to understanding the narrative of value in the late eighteenth century.\u00a0 By looking at the heated discourse among radical journalists (including Coleridge and Paine), experts, the administration, and opposition parliamentarians generated by the Pitt administration\u2019s \u00a01795 loan to Austria and the 1797 suspension, Dick shows that the question at the heart of these wide-ranging debates was not \u201cWhat is value?\u201d but rather \u201cWho has the right to answer the question?\u201d \u00a0Accordingly, the theory of value propagated in review journalism, poetry, and fiction in the period was not trying to reflect, analogically, the complexity of money; rather, it was trying to downplay the expertise required to explain it.<\/p>\n We conclude by moving from economic value to a more explicit consideration of ethics and aesthetics and forward to Hannah Arendt, but we remain in the shadow (or light) of eighteenth- century debates over the public sphere.\u00a0 In \u201cConstructing Liberal Value: From the Scottish Enlightenment to Hannah Arendt,\u201d Hina Nazar<\/strong> considers the parallel between ethical and aesthetic value at the heart not only of not only of British sentimentalism but of the liberal Enlightenment more generally.\u00a0 This aesthetic-ethical analogy has been interpreted by a long line of materialist, new historicist, and poststructuralist cultural critics as promoting an at best nebulous aestheticism and at worst difference-effacing elision of the social and material contexts of moral value.\u00a0 This paper proposes a more affirmative reading of the British Enlightenment\u2019s turn to aesthetics by drawing out the remarkable (and underelaborated) parallels that can be found between sentimental writings and the writings on judgment of the twentieth-century political theorist, Hannah Arendt.\u00a0 By showing how Arendt\u2019s understanding of values are perspectival and relational rather than requiring Kant\u2019s a priori reason, Nazar offers a way of recuperating\u00a0 the liberal attempt to distinguish between \u201cis\u201d and \u201cought\u201d that places the burden of value on individuals capable of complicating\u2014rather than transcending\u2014personal bias through critical encounters with the standpoints of others.\u00a0 Like the other two papers on the panel, her essay invites the panel and our audience to consider the enduring value \u00a0of eighteenth-century concepts, institutions, and practices of value as objects of historical understanding, critique, and, perhaps, emulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here is the proposal for the panel, “Narrating Value in the Long Eighteenth Century,” which includes summaries of the three papers: Whether we trace debates over the relationship between aesthetic, economic, and moral value back to Plato\u2019s expulsion of the poets from the Republic or forward to the special cluster in the January 2012 PMLA,… Continue Reading MLA 2013 Panel, “Narrating Value”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":798,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-108","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/798"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}