Clifford Siskin

Sometimes, Francis Bacon observed, “a question remains a mere question” for “centuries.” Mediating Enlightenment: Past and Present, an international conference organized by Clifford Siskin at New York University, with William Warner in California and Knut Eliassen in Europe, sought answers to many questions about Enlightenment. We now invite you to find them—in abundance—in the individual essays in this volume. But, to our surprise, the Conference as a whole also yielded a collective answer to the big question—the centuries-old question quoted above. We suspect that many of you assume that there cannot be a single answer, except, perhaps the self-reflexive one: Enlightenment is what asks itself what it is. And we know that others are convinced that there are many Enlightenments or none at all. But, in the spirit of Enlightenment conversation, we offer the collected efforts of our colleauges, as well as our own framing introduction, as evidence for a very different answer:

Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation

We will begin by recovering that history, for our place in it is the reason that the time for this answer has, we think, finally come.

Clifford Siskin is the Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University and the Director of The Re:Enlightenment Project at New York University and the New York Public Library. His subject is the interrelations of literary, social, and technological change, with a particular emphasis on print culture: both its historical formation and its current remediation in the face of the electronic and the digital. Links between past and present inform all of his work, from his sequencing of the genres of subjectivity (The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, Oxford) to his recovery of literature's role in the formation of the modern disciplines (The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830, Hopkins). His latest book asks when and how the central genre of Enlightenment became the thing that we now love to blame: the SYSTEM (forthcoming from Chicago). Professor Siskin is also co-editor, with Anne Mellor, of the Palgrave-Macmillan monograph series in "Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print." He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1978 and has been the George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the A. C. Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow, the Waynflete Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and Chair of English at SUNY Stony Brook.