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CUfford Siskin and WiUiam Warner, eds. This Is Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xii+505. $75.00.
Jon Klancher (JK): The coUection This Is Enlightenment can be hard to review as a stand-alone book because it also belongs to a series of actions or gatherings, a larger and controversial "event" taking place over the past several years (including at the conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism last year in Vancouver). At one level, this event has been radiating panels, lectures, forums and other academic spinoffs, starting with the conference "Mediating EnUghtenment" held at NYU in April 2007. It's no smaU undertaking, and the Chicago volume (hereafter TIE) is only the most crystaUized print form of that wider project. Whatever criticisms I myself have, I want to put them in this light -something is happening around here, and we have a pretty good idea by now what it is. But what to caU it? This broader "turn" seems to be crystallizing around 2010, but for several years scholars have been trying to give it a name: a bibUographical turn (Leah Price in PMLA), a digital-humanities turn (Matthew Kirschenbaum in the ADE Journal}, a quantitative turn (Jeffrey WilUams in The Chronicle of Higher Education). ? Any of these caUs could be justified, but my own choice would be to call it a wider "media turn" - on a scale that rivals the scope of earlier Unguistic and cultural turns - and this book speaks to such a turn by gathering scholars notable in literary history, EnUghtenment studies, and media archaeology and asking them how to put those fields together, accentuating and even redefining "media" as the historical operator. As I read it, the volume is asking: To what extent was the EnUghtenment an event in the history of media? But also: what has kept us from grasping Uterary and art history before the late 19th century as we grasp mechanized and mass media after the advent of telegraphy, photography, movies, or tv: namely, as media. I think the more amorphous term the editors invoke - "mediations" - is an effort to generalize the question, so the editors, WiUiam Warner and Clifford Siskin, claim in the Introduction that "Enlightenment is an event...