Romantic Modernisms
Moderator: Matthew Russell
University of Texas at Austin
mrrussell@mail.utexas.edu

Session A

Rejection, Dis-illusion, and Dissolution in Coleridge’s “Constancy to an Ideal Object”

Coleridge’s poem “Dejection: An Ode” (1802) is commonly read as his “writing himself out” of a depressive state which had forestalled his gifts of Romantic vision and poetic utterance. Yet if we read “Dejection” against the later poem “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1804 [1828]), the solutions presented in the first work dissolve. Both poems are concerned with subjective states of experience, the locating and location of a home, and his love for Sara Hutchinson. In “Dejection” Coleridge charts the “fail[ure]” of his “genial spirits” and imaginative powers, a failure that he attributes to his submersion in the “abstruse research” of his philosophical pursuits. In “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” on the other hand, Coleridge explores the previously unconfronted consequences of his German Idealist philosophical position and reliance on his imaginative life. While the first poem moves towards homecoming, unity, and the regaining of a sense of self; the second ends in exile and fragmentation, effectively foreclosing “the possibility of recuperative gestures” and opens out only on an empty, illusory future.

Thomas Simons
Boston College
simonsth@bc.edu

“Living had failed and dead had failed / And I was indeed alone”: Christina Rossetti, Recuperation, and the Abject Sublime

Christina Rossetti’s lyric poems, such as “After Death,” “Echo,” and “A Chilly Night,” create liminal spaces in which the speaker cannot reach her interlocutor and, at times, views her own body as Other. The speaker strives to escape her body in order to mingle with the Other, that she might discover a disembodied Self. This recuperative gesture, however, remains at the margins of the poems, outside of the speaker’s consciousness. Through her sublime act of abjection, Rossetti blends gothic and Christian epistemologies and simultaneously escapes and realizes the female form. Slavoj Žižek’s description of the sublime, in which one seeks sublimity in the gaps of the incommensurable, provides a framework for studying Rossetti’s abject sublimity, located within the spaces of gothic and Christian ontologisms, male and female poetics, and Selfhood and Otherness. This Levinasian realization of the unknowable Other provides Rossetti with a vision of community despite and through her poetics of alienation, although she remains disconnected from it. My project builds upon Barbara Freeman’s “feminine sublime” and Patricia Yaeger’s “female sublime” to include later theories of sublimity and to rediscover Rossetti’s project as fundamentally modern in its focus on disembodied gender, abjection, and alienation.

Kasey Baker

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

kbaker12@utk.edu

Romantic Belatedness

Viewing Byron as a version of the Enlightenment function Hegel saw exemplified in Rameau's Nephew, one that construes ‘the reality of things’ as intrinsic to the nephew's comic function, even as that function construes them as its limit, offers us a critical consciousness of Byron's critical consciousness that gives the latter's contradictions significant form, geistige, shape, rather than pretending (comically) to debunk them only (tragically) to repeat them.  Recognizing and giving adequate poetic form to the complex tragicomedy of history’s failures is, I will argue, the prime function of Hegel's brand of historicist self-consciousness, “Absolute Knowing,” as well as of the “World Legislation” performed by Shelley’s great poetic dialogues with the Lakers in Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, To Wordsworth and Mount Blanc, and with Rousseau in The Triumph of Life.  As Wang and Chandler have suggested, such poetry shares with Hegel the aim of determinately embodying a norm for a self-historicizing kind of being:  one that moves beyond “Romantic Ideology” not by pretending simply to debunk it, but by using the material it offers to shape itself a past, and to engender a normatively post-Romantic self-consciousness through the act of such shaping.

Bo Earle

University of Chicago

boe@uchicago.edu

Session B

The Abject Figure of the “Fallen Angel” in Charlotte Temple

After the Revolution, Americans needed to establish a national community separate from their previous existence as British subjects. In Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, the protagonist of Charlotte elopes and becomes pregnant, but her conduct belies the usual expectations about a “fallen” woman. Charlotte wins friends and influences others based on her innocuously beguiling behavior and also from her own lamentation about the fallacy of her elopement. Her self-denigration only contributes to her appeal, and Rowson also positions Charlotte’s teacher La Rue as a malevolent character who symbolically takes responsibility for the elopement and thus absorbs the wicked component of Charlotte’s behavior. Therefore, Charlotte appears more like a “fallen angel” (Rowson 93) than a traditional “fallen” woman, and she can still enjoy the respect of Rowson’s readers. Nevertheless, Charlotte still serves as an abject figure whose rejection from polite society implicitly strengthens the bonds of sympathetic identification among both British and American characters. At the novel’s end, these characters form a community sympathetic to Charlotte’s plight as they gather around the beacon of her deathbed; however, Charlotte herself remains notably excluded from this community because its basis for identification derives from the characters’ capacity both to pity and exonerate her.

Grace Waitman

Indiana University

gwaitman@indiana.edu

Caleb Williams and the Fantasy of Nation

In this paper I propose a new way of theorizing William Godwin’s Caleb Williams which challenges the critical commonplace of reading it as a domestic novel which centers around the problem of ideological interpolation. Instead, I wish to argue that Godwin’s text implicates nationalistic thinking as one more articulation of the Conservative self/Other paradigm that upholds Aristocratic hegemonic authority. Central to my analysis is the aforementioned problem of inescapability, the ways in which Caleb performs national and racial identity, and the importance of Falkland’s role as plantation owner and slaveholder in the West Indies. I also investigate the possibility that Falkland, as his name suggests, refers to the larger debate over Britain’s colonial presence in the New World. Ultimately I will demonstrate that Caleb Williams renders the nation a discursive fantasy which moves us farther away from the possibility of the republican community proposed by Jacobin and (French) Revolutionary discourse, and in so doing takes part in a larger liberal Romantic project of destroying “England” in the hopes of destroying the socio-political injustice embedded within.

Lauren Shabbab

George Washington University

lshababb@gwu.edu

O Monge de Cister and the Degeneration of Personal Self

Alexandre Herculano is nineteenth-century Portugal’s foremost historical novelist and his second historical novel, O Monge de Cister (1848), explores the futile attempt at personal exile within the Cistercian religious order by a man who wishes to eradicate his personal self.  It becomes evident, through the use of the confession of his traumatic memories to his religious mentor, that Vasco da Silva took the orders of a monk of the Cistercian order to repress his intense shame and guilt for certain past actions and to hide his personal self within the collective community of the church.  Yet Vasco cannot find the forgiveness or the forgetfulness that he desires within the religious confines and the old traumas are exacerbated by new political intrigues involving Vasco’s past life.  This paper emphasizes the degeneration of a noble and honorable nineteenth-century Portuguese citizen into a vengeful and demented social outcast whose inability to find a stable place within his society and his subsequent search for redemption leads to personal ruin and the destruction of his personal self. 

Rebecca Jones-Kellogg

University of Wisconsin-Madison

rljones2@wisc.edu

Subjectivity, Finitude, and the Unsacrificeable in Hawthorne

This talk examines the problem of political subjection through a reading of two famous works by Hawthorne—The Scarlet Letter and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” The suggestion here is that ‘Hawthorne’, a name for an author often identified as the American romantic, cultural expositor par excellence, can instead be read as an index of an investigation into the limits of the political as such. This approach may enable us to delimit the political as a totalizing force with respect to being-in-relation. For years now a tendency in American studies has been to reduce questions of being-in-relation to a matter of identity politics. Study upon study has sought to suture contemporary political concerns (concerns often internal to the American nation-state) to historico-literary recovery projects. Valuable as these studies have often been, they do not always clarify the stakes of their political interventions and the limitation of those interventions. This talk asserts that what gets forgotten in the rush to remember is the limit of remembrance itself, finitude. A reconsideration of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Pearl, and Minister Hooper suggests that finitude at once enables and disables cultural, communal remembrance and incorporation; finitude at once enables and disables a certain sacrifice that every identity demands.

Tim Deines

Michigan State University

deinesti@msu.edu

Session C

Poetry in the Age of Restriction

This paper will discuss the rise of a national print culture in the age of British Romanticism, 1797-1835. Here I propose to rename it polemically, "the Age of Restriction." The name refers to a legislative act that enforced the use of paper money ("restricting" the return of gold for this new paper standard), and so posed a model for national values upon a fiat order, one that moved both economics and the theology of fiat into a modern order. In my language, it was an age inaugurated by an act of fiat; but one begun oddly, because--against, say, God's fiat in Genesis ("let there be light," etc.)--the "Restriction" fiat must highlight its own contingent, often desperate, and inherently circular terms. For unlike God's fiat in an orthodox setting, paper money (credit) is just a
promise, a reification in national terms of the private dilemmas of belief and trust. As such, Restriction crystallized a strikingly modern network of values. Anticipated in the skepticism of Hume, and in the fears of Burke, we see here the first completely unqualified signs of a modern speculative economy.

Eric Reid Lindstrom

Yale University

eric.lindstrom@yale.edu

Fomenting Exile: Romantic Anticipation of ‘De-personalization’ in Keats and Beethoven

A discussion of the Modernist aesthetic of “de-personalization,” often achieved by multivocality and simultaneity, as a form of exile anticipated by the works of John Keats and Ludwig van Beethoven. Keats’s concepts of “negative capability” and the “chameleon poet,” in conjunction with the increasing complexity of Beethoven’s symphonies and piano sonatas, demonstrate the increasing aptitude of Romantic experiencers/audiences for the “strangeness and mystery”—or exile—called for by “negative capability” and the eventual acceptance of the “strangeness and mystery” of Modernism.

Amanda Taylor

California State University at San Bernardino

eowyn@jktaylor.com

The Frontispiece Steel Engraving of the Male Romantic Poet: Fame and Visual

Celebrity in the New Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The first authoritative edition of Byron’s poetry was Thomas Moore’s Works of Byron, published in 1832, eight years after the poet’s death. The 17-volume edition opens with a frontispiece portrait entitled Byron at 19, a steel engraving by William Finden after a family portrait by George Sanders that depicts the young Byron in heroic pose on the shores of Britain, prepared to embark for Europe. Similarly, the first authoritative edition of Percy Shelley’s works, the 1839 Collected Poems edited by Mary Shelley, opens with a frontispiece portrait of Shelley, a steel engraving again executed by William Finden after the familiar Amelia Curran watercolor portrait of the “angelic” young Percy Shelley, open-collared, luminous-eyed, quill in hand. The two portraits differ widely in their composition, their content, and the circumstances under which they were painted. Yet there are significant parallels between these two pictures, each of them private portraits that were reproduced as public frontispiece engravings to significant early editions of the poet’s work, each over time evolving into the “realistic” images of Shelley and Byron as angelic figures of sexual ambiguity that have powerfully influenced our understanding of one strand of Romanticism. Finden’s steel engravings are early examples of what Walter Benjamin refers to as objects of “mass reproduction,” proffering a visual “Shelley” or “Byron” for mass consumption, and presumably opening up for modernity a new type of poet, a romantic youth not long for this world whose physical and effeminate beauty is the mark of poetic genius.

Gerald Egan

University of California, Santa Barbara

gegan@umail.ucsb.edu