This paper reads Oscar Wilde's aphoristic style in terms of the note-taking practices he develops as an undergraduate at Oxford. It treats his use of small, mobile pieces of language as a strategy for dealing with methodological uncertainty in a time of curricular upheaval. His trademark style is perhaps best understood as a form of social notation, whereby pieces of information behave as actors seeking sociality and recombination, rather than placement in systematic arrangements. One significant unpublished source – the ‘Notebook on Philosophy’ – discloses Wilde's engagement with a surprising aphoristic precursor, Francis Bacon, who deploys the form for similar purposes. In modelling a form of non-teleological informational assembly, Wilde's notebooks also body forth the utopian social life he conceives in his later critical writings.
This article proposes a way of linking textual form and the social world. The forms in question are the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, specifically those he kept between 1866 and 1875, a period that begins with his conversion to Catholicism, initiation into Jesuit training, and rejection of poetry. These five notebooks (A1–A5) have struck some readers as intensely asocial. Their creator was famously resistant to circulation and readership, on one hand (“Please not to read,” he inscribes on the inside front cover of the first), and more concerned with natural than human phenomena, on the other. I show instead that the notebooks project networks of relation between humans, objects, and the natural world. My hope is that what follows will refresh some of the ways we think about and navigate online social forms in the twenty-first century.
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