SEMINARS AND SESSIONS
As well as our three plenary speeches, Romantic Mediations will feature a range of sessions including regular panels, special sessions, affiliated sessions, and seminars. Submission information for regular panels and special sessions are listed below. Titles and abstracts of plenary presentations and seminars will be posted as they become available. To view abstracts of plenaries or seminars, click on the title. (Javascript must be enabled to view the abstracts.)
PLENARY SESSIONS
The three plenary speeches for the conference will be delivered by:
Heather Jackson (Department of English, University of Toronto)
“What’s Biography Got to Do With It?”
Iwan Rhys Morus (Department of History, University of Wales at Aberytswyth)
“What Happened to Scientific Sensation?”Clifford Siskin (Department of English, New York University) and William Warner (Department of English, University of California-Santa Barbara)
“If This is Enlightenment, then What is Romanticism?” [PDF]
SEMINARS
As has become customary at NASSR conferences, Romantic Mediations will feature several seminar sessions. Each seminar will focus on a pre-circulated, article-length work-in-progress by a distinguished scholar in our field. The discussion will commence with a short presentation by the seminar leader and a respondent. Upon registration, attendees will be invited to select up to three seminars that they would wish to attend; the conference committee will try to accommodate first choices to the best of its ability. The 2010 seminar presenters are:
Angela Esterhammer (University of Zurich),
“Print and Performance in the Late-Romantic Information Age”
Mary A. Favret (University of Indiana),
“The Pains of Reading: Keats’s Vision”
Celeste Langan (University of California at Berkeley),
“Romantic Neutrality: Bullets, Bulletins, and Don Juan”
Deidre Lynch (University of Toronto),
"Poetry at Death's Door"
Laura Mandell (Miami University),
“Transmediating Silence”
Tom Mole (McGill University),
“Romanticism, Remediation, and Reception History”
Charlotte Sussman (Duke University),
"Half Full: Malthus, Godwin, Barbauld, and the Mobility of Culture"
Rei Terada (University of California at Irvine),
"Looking at the Stars Forever"
Gillen Darcy Wood (University of Illinois),
“Romantic Eco-historicism”
SPECIAL SESSIONS
"Action and Person in Hegel and Coleridge"
Organizer: Thomas Pfau (Duke University)
"Irish and British Romanticisms in 2010: National Identity and Transnational Perspectives”
Organizer: Guinn Batten (Washington University, St. Louis)
Irish and British Romanticisms in 2010: National Identity and Transnational Perspectives
Papers are invited that consider the long 19th-century in Irish Literature. What does the field look like 200 years after the death of Joseph Cooper Walker and a century after the birth of Samuel Ferguson? Of particular interest will be proposals that are comparative, considering (for example) versions of antiquarianism in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales.
“Pets and Meat”
Organizer: Ron Broglio
Animals play a variety of roles within the Romantic period: objects in the picturesque landscape, items of scientific inquiry and natural history, and commodified agents as pets, livestock, hunting and race animals. They are markers of the exotic and wild as well as the tame and domestic. They serves as examples for the differences between humans and animals while also invoking haunting similarities. In other cases, animals resist cultural appropriation and meaning such that the agency of animals bites back at the human. Overall, animals serve as material and figural subjects which help humans mediate divides of nature-culture.
This panel proposes to explore how nonhuman animals—which may include the animality of the human—troubles the markers of cultural signification during the Romantic period.
“Lives in Print”
Organizer: Daniel Cook (University of Bristol)
This special session invites speakers to scrutinize the relationship between literary biography (broadly defined) and print culture. How were biographies and biographical essays and reviews mediated in the periodical press, anthologies, dictionaries, and the book trade at large? Papers might trace the adaptation or abridgement of major biographies, examine the role of the authors, collectors or printers in the process of dissemination, or they might focus on the appropriation or misuse of anecdotes, facts, or other biographical curiosities. Other points of investigation might include the political, financial, and pedagogical implications of the printing of lives in certain formats and forums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
“What is ‘post-Enlightenment’?”
Organizer: Tony Jarrells (University of South Carolina)
The term 'post-Enlightenment' has been used lately to talk about a Romanticism that is neither an outright reaction against an earlier period of Enlightenment nor merely an extension or development of that period. But such a description does not tell us what the space between these two positions actually is or looks like. Kant's answer to the question "what is Enlightenment" ("man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity") was famously qualified by his claim that his was not an enlightened age but rather an "age of enlightenment" - a qualification that has focused scholarly attention on the conditions that made Enlightenment possible: printed books; new genres like the novel, the newspaper, and political economy; debate; experiment; commerce; coffee. For this panel, I would like to continue this focus on conditions, forms, and institutions and ask, first, whether talk of a post-Enlightenment period is justified, and second, how it might be helpful for mediating a Romantic field expanded and reconfigured by new work on technology, science, geography, temporality, and genre.
“Writing and Empire: Mediation and Irresolution
Organizer: Olivera Jokic (John Jay College, CUNY)
This session invites submissions that address the complex relationship between writing and imperialism in the Romantic period. A medium whose importance encompasses but cannot be limited to literature, writing has been a subject of intense recent interest among historians and anthropologists of imperialism. Understanding imperialism as a writing project in its own right—Karl Marx once called the East India Company an “enormous writing machine”—this session invites scholarship focusing on writing as a crucial medium of empire building, on the ground and in the imagination. Papers are invited that investigate how writing worked as an instrument of representation (of colonies and colonial subjects); of invention (of emergent territorial and political realities); and of political and imaginative control (over the entities freshly conceived of as fields of domination). Equally welcome are papers that examine writing’s failures and insecurities; its relationship to the persistence of political, literary and sexual scandal in various colonies; and its contaminating effects on the notoriously volatile colonial archive. Also welcome are those papers from which we will learn more about the mutually constitutive relationship of imperialism and writing to “modernity.”
“Romantic Bards, Romantic Reviewers”
Organizer: Caroline E. Kimberly, (University of Houston)
This panel hopes to shed light on the reciprocal mediation between authors and reviewers of the Romantic period. In an era fraught by revolutions of class, politics, and taste, literary critics stood as a cultural vanguard, protecting the ranks of professionals from the amateurs, the traditional from the avant garde, the British from the Other. Yet these critics also saw the dissolution of their power over the masses through the elucidating and often eviscerating responses of those very writers whom they hoped to discredit. Whether in private correspondence, published apologies like Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, or incendiary satires, such as Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the targets of their “paper bullets of the brain” chose to mount their own defensive against those who accused them of being “ignorant of their own profession.” This panel welcomes papers that address either side in this battle for British literary culture, that explore the mediating influence each side may have had on the other, or that consider the chimerical role played by the poet-as-critic/critic-as-poet.
“Romanticism and Media Archeology”
Organizer: Daniel O’Quinn (University of Guelph)
The purpose of this special session is to apply the strategies of media archeology to the period between 1760 and 1830. A number of important case studies for theorists of emergent and convergent media are firmly grounded in the late-nineteenth century. The influential work of Kittler, Gitelman and Benjamin provides methodological possibilities for re-thinking earlier forms of cultural activity. Crucial transitions in print media, in theatrical representation and in all manner of mechanical representations were radically expanding the realm of culture and entertainment in Georgian England. As Gitelman and others have argued, media represent and delimit representing, so that new media provide new sites for the ongoing and vernacular experience of representation as such. This session is especially interested in papers that either theorize medial change in this period or that engage in specific analyses of emergent media. Contributors may choose to look at such issues as pre-cinematic representation, proto-photography, visual machines, panoramas, museological or theatrical spectacle, or any of the myriad developments in print media.
“The Fate of the Subject in the Age of Print Culture”
Organizer: Emily Rohrbach (Northwestern University)
At a time of rapidly expanding print culture, Romantic literature persistently exposes the subject’s virtual status: the “self” as artifice or artificial production. Percy Shelley declares, “The words I, and you and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement.” This special session invites papers that consider the formal, aesthetic, ethical, and/or political implications of the mediated subject in relation to the technological mediation of the printing press or Romantic-period print culture. Rather than emphasizing ways in which the subject is determined by cultural ideologies or material conditions (as new historicism and certain cultural studies approaches have done), this session particularly welcomes papers that attend to ways in which Romantic literature upholds the singularity of the literary (or human) subject, perhaps even by the very exposure of its own virtual status. Especially encouraged are papers that explore how this strain of Romantic thought relates to more recent theories of subjectivity and mediation, while situating the thought also in relation to, even if not wholly subject to, the material conditions in which the literature was originally produced—and printed.
"Wordsworths Narrative Mediations"
Organizer: Chuck Rzepka (Boston University)
Narrative in Wordsworth's poetry has traditionally been a major focus of critical attention and, often, of ideological critique. This CFP solicits new approaches to, and readings of, Wordsworth’s use of narrative as means, measure, and mask. Narrative is here conceived quite malleably: as a tool or device mediating the poet’s agency and his poetry’s affect, as conduit or recursus, as speech act or index of intention, as flow or overflow, as (of course) portrait or frame, and, in general, as a means of negotiation, prevarication, temporization, and temporalization. Subtopics of interest include any and all things conceivably related to poetry as a genre of narrative (as distinct from strictly descriptive or explanatory or expostulatory) mediation: meter as ameliorator (of passion) or as ornament (of prose) or as measure (musical or otherwise) of speech; diction as a way of mediating “real language”; the impact of narrative continuities and discontinuities, narrative genres and questions of gender, narrative as telling and "telling" (numbering), and "telling" (discerning).
“Romanticism and/in Decline”
Organizer: Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University)
Decline, as Peter Burke reminds us, is a “vast topic,” and this panel invites papers on any aspect of it including decay, ruin, catastrophe, degeneration, disintegration, and decomposition. Of especial interest are papers addressing cultural decline, and more specifically still the decline of literature. Isaac D’Israeli, for example, declared in 1795 that “The literary character has, in the present day, singularly degenerated in the public mind,” and we see similar anxieties in Wordsworth, Barbauld, Peacock, and many others. Why, in a period that we now associate with cultural efflorescence and what Levi-Strauss would call a “hot chronology” was there so much anxiety about decline, especially the decline of the arts? Might the understanding of decline in the Romantic period help us to understand current prognostications about the decline of Romantic studies as it is swallowed up by the “long eighteenth century” or the “long nineteenth century”? What, in other words, is the relationship between the construction of literary/cultural history and the anticipation of cultural decline? How was the understanding of decline in the Romantic period mediated, and might some of those same factors continue to mediate our own anxieties about the decline of Romantic studies?
“Haiti”
Organizers: Paul Yonguist (U of Colorado, Boulder) and Fran Botkin (Towson University)
This session will explore Britain’s designs on St. Domingo during the revolution there (1791-1804). Renewed scholarly interest in the occluded history of Haiti provides an occasion for critics of Romantic culture to examine Britain’s relationship with the colony called the jewel of the West Indies. We invite papers approaching that relationship from any perspective: British, French, or that the slaves whose rebellion repulsed those colonial powers. We welcome work on any aspect of culture (literary, visual, or material) that illuminates British attitudes toward the revolution in St. Domingo. Our aim is simple: to advance the memory and celebrate the effects of colonial revolution.
AFFILIATED SESSIONS
Romantic Mediations will also feature 7 special sessions organized in association with other societies, journals, and communities both within and outside of NASSR.
NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online
“Networks of Romanticism”
Organizer: Andy Stauffer (University of Virginia)
NINES and 18thConnect are sponsoring a special session devoted to Romanticism as/in social and technological networks. We encourage proposals that approach the study of the Romantic period via its networks of persons, discourses, places, objects, and printed materials, as well as working through the implications of digital technology for our research and systems of scholarly communication. Preference will be given to papers that take up both of these aspects of the panel topic.
SHARP: The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing
“Transatlantic Print Culture”
Organizer: Leith Davis (Simon Fraser University)
In The Atlantic Enlightenment, editors Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano suggest that transatlanticism is not a “compound product of modern scholarship” but “a framework intrinsic to the articulation of the modern world as it was perceived and described” in the eighteenth century. Extending Manning’s and Cogliano’s investigation further into the Romantic era, this panel examines how print culture served to frame that articulation. It is interested in material perspectives on how books, authors and readers travelled across the Atlantic as well as more theoretical perspectives on how Atlantic travel worked to mediate ideas. It also asks how a transatlantic perspective might inform and/or deform our sense of what constitutes the Romantic era. In referring to “print culture,” the panel includes the many different forms of print (including visual culture, printed music, etc.) as well as oral and aural culture.
International Gothic Association (IGA)
“Romantic Mediations of the Gothic”
Organizer: John Whatley (Simon Fraser University)
Recent work by Hogle, Botting, Smith, Clery, Hurley, Sage, Wright, Punter, Hughes, Gamer, Bruhm, Miles, Gracuin, Watt and many others have opened a fresh direction of research in the gothic influences and subtexts of Romanticism. Most romantic writers felt compelled to contest, revise, control, refine or otherwise mediate popular Gothic texts then flowering in Radcliffe, Beckford, Lewis, Dacre, Lathom, Godwin, Hogg, Maturin, new translations from the German and French; and especially in an arising popular culture of the Minerva and other presses from the 1780s on. We are looking for romantic and gothic scholars interested in investigating the mediation of the gothic in the romantic text. Such themes as self fashioning in gothic romanticism, the romantic remediation of the gothic uncanny, the German, French, or North American influence in the romantic gothic, print culture of the romantic gothic, revisions of gothic and romantic in art and architecture, or the ways in which specific romantic figures or their circles may have mediated gothic modes are a few of the themes we envision for this panel.
German Society for English Romanticism
“Mediation, Mediality, and Immediacy”
Organizer: Christoph Bode (University of Munich)
There is a marked tendency in works of art and literature in the Romantic period to highlight and foregound their mediality, mostly through enhanced auto-referentiality. Curiously enough, there is also a drift in the opposite direction, viz. the attempt to achieve effects of immediacy, giving the (momentary) illusion that what you experience isn't mediated at all – shock, the sublime, arousal, or even orgasmic or oceanic feelings. This special session will look at how this tension between (inescapable) mediality and an urge towards purported immediacy is negotiated in concrete terms, but also at how this can be conceptualized theoretically. Finally, the session will also scrutinize mediation and transposition effects that occur if one medium is exchanged for another, or one language for another. In sum, this panel seeks papers with a comparativist orientation toward the tension between mediation and immediacy in British and European Romanticism.
European Romantic Review (ERR)
“The Mediation of Romantic Drama”
Organizer: Frederick Burwick
The transformation from text to performance imposes upon the drama multiple dimensions of mediation. As Gesamtkunst, theatre performance is affected by the ideas and influence of the theatre manager, individual performers and cast ensemble, stage design and scene paintings, lighting and special effects, songs and musical accompaniment, playhouse architecture and theatre audience. Recent social or political events may provide a context capable of exciting an audience to a response not otherwise anticipated. Even on the way to the theatre, a play may have been altered by censorship and the intrusion of the Examiner of Plays. On occasions, too, further alteration takes place as the playwright watches rehearsal, or even after opening night further adjustments might be made. In short, the play as performance is subject to a vast array of mediating conditions.
NASSR Graduate Student Caucus
“‘What is now proved was once, only imagin'd'; or, What Every Graduate Student Should Know About Journal Publication”
(This panel will not require submissions)
In today’s highly competitive academic job market, journal publications are an essential component of an applicant’s overall profile. For many graduate students, however, the prospect of submitting an essay for publication can be a rather intimidating one. The new NASSR Graduate Student Caucus has therefore invited editors from some of the leading Romantic-era journals to help demystify this process. These experts will address issues such as what makes an outstanding journal article, what weaknesses they find specific to graduate student submissions, how they would describe the specific focus of their journal, and what is their journal's stance on reviews written by graduate students. There will also be a substantial amount of time reserved for Q & A. This special session ultimately aims to empower future Romanticists with the information required to contribute to the larger scholarly community.
PANELS
The call for papers includes details on the aims and topics of the conference. Potential attendees are reminded that panels will certainly features 3 and in some cases 4 speakers and thus papers should be limited to 20 minutes to leave ample time for feedback and discussion. All presenters must be members of NASSR.