Stopped Leaks and Littlenesses: Details in the Prosaic Poetry of Robert Browning
Event details
“Jagged, ugly, useless”: Walter Bagehot’s 1864 critique of Robert Browning’s poetry still resonates in critical misinterpretation today. What perplexes critics is Browning’s attention to detail, which not only offends austere formalist sensibilities, but also complicates his poems’ clarity and focus. His long poem The Ring and the Book (1868-9) is larded with minute details not clearly relevant to the poem’s central “murder-case,” but which prolong it across twelve books narrated by multiple speakers.
This presentation will show how Browning’s proliferation of details signifies the breakup of classical representational order under the advent of a democratic modern subjectivity that perceives and imbues quotidian details with significance and interest. In taking the unreliable testimonial records of a recondite seventeenth-century legal trial for his subject, Browning reveals the supposedly heroic past to itself comprise what the philosopher Hegel terms “the prose of the world”: the profuse material and bureaucratic contingencies that embed modern man and impede the flow of narrative. Yet Browning transforms details into modes of modern subjective expression, by charging them with the personal perspectives, emotions, and interests of his multiple speakers, from the Pope to the murderer and his victim, to the lawyers and the Roman public. In using details to register and reveal differing experiences of the same event by different speakers, Browning fragments any objective or unitary conception of truth, building to a many-sided conception of truth that remains perpetually open to revision.
Dr Pritika Pradhan (University of York)
Pritika Pradhan is a Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, and Convenor of
the MA in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of York. She completed her PhD
in English at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and undergraduate degrees in English at the
University of Cambridge and the University of Delhi, India. Her work on John Ruskin
appeared in ELH, and her chapter on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was published in Post45
Vs. The World (Vernon Press). Her short fiction and public writing have appeared in Electric
Literature, Literary Hub, and The Mays Anthology. She is currently at work on her first
monograph, Modernity’s Marks: Details in Victorian Literature and Aesthetics, and on her
first novel, The Transient, a story of immigration and intellectual coming of age.