y introduction to Re:Enlightenment coincided with a point in my career at which I had just started giving serious attention to the work of Francis Bacon, as I had begun working on a series of research questions on knowledge in the eighteenth-century novel. That work started with my interest in the Royal Society. Those initial inquiries led me to the work of John Bender and J. Paul Hunter on the novel and experimentalism. This was before I knew that John was involved in Re:Enlightenment and around the same time I met and started talking with Cliff Siskin and Bill Warner about the legacies of the historical Enlightenment. In brief, the triangulation of Bacon + a shift in my research interests toward the history of knowledge and knowledge organization + my introduction to Re:Enlightenment at the Stanford meeting in 2018 was both coincidental and felicitous.
To that point I had conceptualized knowledge in terms of either empirical accuracy or deductive validity; at that point I began to conceptualize
knowledge also as a function of use and usefulness. In that sense what Re:Enlightenment has brought my work is primarily, among many things, the explanatory power that comes from inserting the concepts of use and usefulness into my work on the contributions that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels, travelogues, scientific atlases, etc. have made to knowledge. That is, these have been not just ‘forms’ or even historical genres, but instruments. Inserting use and usefulness into my concept of knowledge has been fruitful for my work on specific objects of study (as in the examples above), but has also worked in the other direction, from the specific to the general, as a way of clarifying and explaining my sense of which methodological and epistemological moves I think are necessary for my work and work like it to be useful beyond the immediate contexts of liberal arts college classroom and the field of literary studies.
Likewise I’ve come to understand my public-facing or general-audience writing as not useful by and of
the larger and multiple audiences it reaches, but by its capacity to offset or work against even a fraction of what Seth Rudy has characterized as the ‘anti-knowledge’ forces at work today. I’ve had a lot to say about how Re:Enlightenment has shaped my work, and being relatively new to Re:Enlightenment I can’t imagine I’ve shaped much of that organism at all! But in the spirit of useful knowledge, I aim to remedy that.