Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (review)

Abstract

128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:1 experience) complement each other. Though sometimes we might find ourselves teaching the subject of our research, we often teach courses that have little to do with it. Simply put, the two activities compete for our attention, so that, in practical terms, the time we devote to our research is very likely time taken away from our students. Tomarken offers an arrestingly simple solution to this problem: we should talk to our students about our scholarly publications and thus forge a link, in the classroom, between our research and pedagogical lives. One possible disadvantage of this pedagogical procedure is that, in making our research the central topic of classroom discussion, we might find ourselves indulging in the academic version ofthe egotistical sublime, awing our students with the number of our books and articles rather than facing them—in a formulation Tomarken borrows from philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (p. 45)—as fellow human beings entrusted to us for our care and instruction. This reservation aside, I found in Tomarken's book precisely the inspirational message I needed to remind myself that what we do as teachers really matters. Moreover, I discovered, in his close readings ofworks that I was about to teach again, practical advice to enrich my own teaching with the critical insights of a generous scholar who, on the evidence of the story he so movingly tells, is also a caring and remarkable teacher. AlbertJ. Rivero Marquette University Barbara M. Benedict. Curiosity: A Cultural History ofEarly Modern Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ix + 321pp. US$45. ISBN 0-226-04263-4. Barbara M. Benedict's new book is an ambitious and fascinating account of the ways curiosity—everything from scientific inquiry to illicit sexual peeping—was represented by the various discourses at work in English culture from the Restoration through the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her principal argument is that, for writers and cultural observers during this period, curiosity signifies "cultural ambition" (p. 23)—an attempt to "go beyond" (p. 254) one's place and thus transcend and destabilize boundaries. The book traces the ways that the value ofcuriosity, so defined, is contested in a wide range of written texts. Repeatedly, Benedict argues, curiosity is depicted as a kind ofperversion, which makes the curious person REVIEWS129 monstrous, ridiculous. But curiosity is also the very emblem ofmodernity, a new way of seeing capable of revealing hidden wonders and explaining the physical universe. In the unstable discursive atmosphere of the long eighteenth century, with science not yet fully differentiated from the circus sideshow or the occult, these two positions repeatedly echo one another and reverse themselves, as everyone seeks to deploy curiosity in his or her own interest, while at the same time ridiculing the monstrous and immoral excesses of others. The result is a complex array of textual representations, which Benedict elucidates with considerable subtlety and wit. Curiosity: A Cultural History ofEarly Modem Inquiry is organized chronologically , treating "clusters of events and literary texts that express specific conceptions of curiosity at particular times" (p. 20). These "specific conceptions of curiosity" give the work a thematic organization as well—and so Benedict treats, in turn, the figure of the scientist, the identification of curiosity with modernity and progress, the "reciprocal objectification of curiosity and femininity" (p. 21), the rise of the literary connoisseur or expert, and the representation of curiosity as "a rich form of resistance" (p. 202). Benedict draws dozens of literary texts into her discussion, among them works by Marlowe, Shadwell, Cavendish, Behn, Pope, Defoe, Swift, Gay, Haywood, Manley, Johnson, Walpole, Radcliffe, Godwin, and Shelley; she analyses pamphlets, scientific reports, museum guides, newspaper stories, broadsides, advertisements, and cultural phenomena such as the Cock Lane Ghost, the Bottle Conjurer fraud, the case of Elizabeth Canning, and hot-air ballooning. The book contains nineteen illustrations, including a man with the head of a woman growing from his stomach and a parsnip in the shape of a human hand. Benedict's command over this extraordinary collection of literature, popular culture, and weird science is remarkable: the book is clearly the product ofyears of careful thinking and research. As the various images of curiosity accumulate, Benedict...