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This essay proposes to retrace some aspects of the “ethical turn” that affects the humanities today to the codification of “sympathy” in what Geoffrey Hartman has described as Wordsworth’s “rhetoric of community.” Focusing on the figure of the infant in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems, the essay argues for a recovery in Wordsworth’s text of the critique of sympathy accompanying the ideology of sympathy of which he has become a canonical representative. While the ideology of sympathy typically denies the difference sympathy is said to celebrate, Wordsworth’s text is read here as a timely record of this defensive encryption inviting resistance to the current privatization of sympathy as surrogate justice.
Ortwin de Graef is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at KU Leuven. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and George Eliot through Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza and Alan Warner. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary.
