476 BOOK REVIEWS tie even the very logic on which such dialectical reversals depend” (4). To the extent that error is already by definition divided from itself, it can not be simply opposed to directed movement; rather, in its (dis)articula tion as errance, it manifests itself in multiple and heterogeneous ways as non-directed, uncontainable, and uncontrollable reflux, convulsions, or ir ruptions. The movements of errance take place at the threshold of the eco nomic in the sense that the “risk” they constitute does not, in Sng’s vocab ulary, come with “a corresponding guarantee of recompense” and thus may not “yield profit” for the operations of knowledge-production (7, 8). Potentially even aneconomic, they may “turn out to be utterly incommen surate to any model of conversion and empowerment” (8). In offering the etymology of “error,” Sng notes that the second meaning of “wandering from the right path” is a “pejorative one that became preva lent in English usage after the seventeenth century,” while “fi]n the Ro mance languages and in German, the neutral meaning of error as mere ‘moving about’ survived much longer” (4). While Sng himself does not pursue the implications of the word’s acquisition of a pejorative connota tion specifically in English usage and specifically after the seventeenth cen tury, he opens the door for critics of a historicist orientation to engage with that question. What relationship might there be between the historicity of the word “error” and the historicity of the economic metaphors Sng, in common with Adorno and Horkheimer, uses to critique the alliance in modernity of instrumental reason with liberal capitalism? Bringing the practice of rhetorical reading in connection with concerns of the Frankfurt School, The Rhetoric ofError from Locke to Kleist reinspects fundamental pre mises underlying knowledge-production and takes risks that revitalize if not remunerate the task of reading. Emily Sun National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan Mary Jacobus. Romantic Things: a Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. Chicago: Univer sity of Chicago Press. 2012. Pp. x+221. $45There are some books that have a reach beyond that of the simply critical or scholarly, recording as they do the movement of a way of feeling and thinking about a subject unbound from a particular methodological or his torical path. Such books emerge from a career of reflection, the author en gaging with, but no longer limited by, the competing discourses that shape his or her field and now free to ask big questions in the context ofa mass of reading from various disciplines and philosophies. Mary Jacobus’s new SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) BOOK REVIEWS 477 book, Romantic Things, fulfils this promise. As one of the architects ofwhat we now call “Romantic studies,” Jacobus here develops the phenomeno logical implications of the period’s investment in subjective reading prac tices into a way of thinking about or through “things” (clouds, orchards, trees, rocks, stones, epitaphs). The epigram to the book, three lines from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, heralds how such thinking ensues, pointing the reader’s attention to “the endless store of things, / Rare, or at least so seeming, every day / Found all about me” (1:119—21). These at once everyday but magical things provide the basis for Jacobus’s exploration of how Wordsworth’s encounters with things invite the reader to understand how the world comes to be in and through language, the senses, and con sciousness, all of which come together in a realm of feeling that grants us access to the poet’s One Life. Developing Derrida’s essay, “Che cos’e la poesia,” in which the poem is figured as a balled-up hedgehog, Jacobus thinks of the lyric as a way of “affectively, playfully” (74) observing both the living and the inanimate world. The lyric, she maintains, teaches us how to address and feel through an inner perceptual mode that changes as we sleep and breathe and shifts, rather than diminishes, when our senses adapt with the onset of blindness or deafness. Indeed the subtitle of the book, taken from Carson McCullers’ short story of the same name, creates a picture of the world in which meaning is sensed as much as rationalized, a...
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Mar 4, 2014
Maarten Beirens 
Open Access