Visual Victorians: Response

Abstract

as i undertook my assigned task of acting as a kind of scholarly sleuth or scout at the most recent meeting of the north american victorian studies association, i found myself reflecting on the sensual experiences of conferences: a swirl of words and ideas, tastes, sounds, sights, and spectacles. in short, academic meetings like those that occurred in Pasadena, california in october 2013 function simultaneously as opportunities for exchange and debate and feasts for the senses, spaces in which we rely not just on our intellectual capacities and auditory capabilities but also, for those of us who possess it, the ability to see. two developments in recent years have, in fact, furthered this notion that conferences are increasingly visual experiences: the growing use of PowerPoint presentations and the proliferation of studies of visual culture, not only by art historians but also by those who identify professionally, first and foremost, as historians or literary critics. as i contemplated the program in anticipation of the task set before me, i found myself thinking not only about the theme of the conference—“evidence”—but also about the different ways in which scholars now communicate their ideas and showcase their most compelling sources. the turn toward the visual that now characterizes many academic disciplines is transforming various aspects of humanistic inquiry in ways that mimic, at least in part, the transformations experienced by victorian subjects as they began to engage more fully with the emerging visual culture of the nineteenth century. one need not probe very deeply to find interesting areas of overlap. Just as the nineteenth century, with its reliance on new technologies of reproduction and projection, was defined (to borrow from Walter Benjamin) as an age of mechanical reproduction, the past twenty years have come to be known as an age of new media in which the computer literate have at their fingertips a virtually limitless supply of internet-based visual material. similarly, the transformations of