Abstract: “Obscenity and Value: The Case of Burns”
I consider Robert Burns’s carnivalesque defiance of the ascendant bourgeois ideology of prudential economy, reinforced by Lowland Scotland’s Presbyterian church as well as Scottish Enlightenment political economy, in his “Cantata” (unpublished during his lifetime) Love and Liberty. The cantata – a collection of songs, mainly in vernacular Scots, interlinked by recitatives – dramatizes a festive gathering of beggars, whores and other down-and-outs on a winter’s night, where they get drunk, brag, spar, sing, have sex, and pawn their ragged clothes for drink. These disreputable representatives of the rural underclass perform an ecstatic, obscene conception of value realized in present sensuous experience – flouting the temporality of investment, credit, interest and return that conditions capitalism’s regime of value. I’ll link this to the larger topic of popular festivity in Burns’s work and the longer tradition of Scots vernacular poetry it both resumes and criticizes, as well as economic theories of obscenity and excess (e.g., Bataille’s La Part maudite).
Bio: University of California, Berkeley, USA “Settler Pastoral: Scotland in South Africa”
Ian Duncan is Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992); Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007); and Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, 2019). He is currently editing The Cambridge History of Scottish Literature and The Cambridge Companion to Walter Scott(both for Cambridge University Press).