Troping Mood: Pfau, Wordsworth, and Hegel

Drawing on discussions of mood in Kant, Novalis, Hegel, and Heidegger, Thomas Pfau, in his recent major work, Romantic Moods , provides an innovative and philosophically nuanced approach to the study of affect. In doing so, he challenges key aspects of new historicism, arguing that history is to be found not in actual events but in the prediscursive, collective, quasi‐cognitive mood that partly registers and partly resists them. Such a mood, he argues, can never be captured directly, but is best evoked in the virtual mode of literature; as a result, rather than falsifying a material history, literature remains faithful to a bewildered historicity betrayed by the fixity of actual events. Yet Pfau's analysis of three subperiods of romantic paranoia, trauma, and melancholy tends to separate them too strictly from each other; in Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems, Blake's Book of Urizen , and Godwin's Caleb Williams , the literature of paranoia, by carrying out a critique of its own premises, transforms into the literature of trauma, thereby shifting from the articulation of one mood into that of another. These instances of self‐critique participate in a literary version of the dialectic, whereby feeling reflects formally on itself. Moreover, Pfau's interweaving of romantic lyric and modern philosophical reflection suggests that for him, romanticism is an exemplary instance of modernity; what he leaves out of view is the possibility that modernity itself is a trope, a strong interpretation, to which we might best respond with a nonmodern critique.