2020 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar

Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris

Friday 3-Saturday 4 April 2020

The Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789 was the first overtly revolutionary act of the French Revolution and marked the beginning of an epoch in which public speech acts took on unprecedented political significance. The ceremonial odes and hymns of the fêtes de fédération were another manifestation of this renascence of orality, restoring the ancient Pindaric tradition of poetry as public performance and giving new meaning to odic conventions such as invocation, exhortation and apostrophe. In the work of André Chénier and others, this new lyric function produced major poetry. Meanwhile, in the halls of the political clubs, in the National Convention and revolutionary Committees, and from lecterns, pulpits and courtroom benches across France, oratory of all kinds shaped the course of history and decided the fate of individuals. Even on the executioner’s scaffold, rhetorical amplification became the preferred mode of address, a grim illustration of Baudelaire’s subsequent observation about ‘the grandiloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions’.

The revitalisation of performative language was not confined to the 1789 Revolution, nor to France. Britain experienced what many still consider a golden age of political eloquence, as orators of the calibre of Pitt, Burke, Fox and Sheridan jousted in parliament and extended their orations through the medium of print. Outside parliament, the growth of the corresponding societies, of other political clubs and associations, and of political lecturing created numerous opportunities for public address, the communicative practices and clandestine rituals of certain organisations attracting repressive measures such as the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797. Radical writers mimicked French revolutionary styles in odes to Liberty and on the Bastille, while satirists parodied their efforts in mock-odes to the guillotine and pseudo-songs travestying revolutionary enthusiasm. Sermons, notably in the Nonconformist churches, were another front in the oral war of ideas, fusing religion and politics in provocative ways. Educational lecturing also underwent a remarkable boom, in the new Royal Institution and other fashionable lecturing institutions.

This two-day symposium will assess the literary significance of this mobilisation of orality and public utterance, and explore links between the speech acts of politicians, polemicists and educators and the writings of poets and other authors. How is the Romantic revaluation of the ode which produced the famous lyrics of Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Victor Hugo – and of less well-known figures such as Southey, Hemans, Iolo Morganwg and Peter Pindar – connected with the revival of ceremonial ode-writing and public ritual? How are the ‘speech genres’ of everyday life integrated into the more complex genres of imaginative literature, as Bakhtin postulated? Can speech-writing, sermonising or toast-making be themselves a form of literary activity? What happens when legally, morally binding oaths and commitments are broken, forcing the swearer to recant, in public again – are such disavowals part of the culture of apostasy and disenchantment posited by literary historians of Romanticism? And to what extent do these purposive deployments of public speech enter the literary and rhetorical theory of the period?

We invite proposals on any aspect of the literary and verbal life of Britain and France from 1789 to 1830 that relates to this broad set of issues. Topics may include but are not confined to:

•       Oaths, affirmations and other verbal rituals
•       Toasts and toasting
•       Public lectures and lecturing
•       Denunciation, recantation and confession
•       Proclamations, declarations and vindications
•       Odes, hymns and songs
•       Apostrophe, personification and other poetic devices
•       Literature and public ceremony
•       Dialectic of publicness and privacy in Romantic lyric
•       Political, religious and forensic oratory
•       Illocutionary acts and performative language
•       Gendered eloquence
•       Dialogues and dialogism
•       Rhetorical theory of the Romantic period

Papers will be 25 to 30 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions.

Send title of paper and abstract (300 words), with brief CV, to marc.poree@ens.fr and d.duff@qmul.ac.uk by 31 January 2020

Organised by Marc Porée (ENS), David Duff (QMUL) and the Paris Steering Group of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar. For further information, see http://londonparisromantic.com/

3-5 June 2020,

Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Northumbria University, in connection with a three-year Leverhulme Trust-funded major project, is organising a two-day conference focusing on writing by and about doctors and other health practitioners, encompassing everything from physicians, apothecaries and botanists to midwives and cunning women. The aim of the conference is to give scholars the opportunity to explore the phenomenon of writing doctors and its wide social effects, whether it be representations of medical practitioners in literature and art, or creative works written by medical people. The interdisciplinary nature of the subject invites work on cultural, economic and gender history, as well as literary, visual and performing arts.

Plenary Speakers

Michelle Faubert, Associate Professor of English, University of Manitoba and Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University; Pratik Chakrabarti, Professor in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester; Tita Chico, Professor of English, University of Maryland.

The movement of medical writing from Latin to English in the Early Modern era opened up knowledge previously monopolised by an elite readership. Medical practitioners of both genders recognised the potential to build up their brand by catering to a burgeoning market of eager new readers. Publishers and booksellers capitalised on increased literary rates and greater purchasing powers amongst the public to produce ever-growing quantities of scientific texts – further fuelling public fascination with health and wellbeing, especially that of women. Practitioners, in entering this marketplace, were laid increasingly open to public ownership, as a personality behind the prose, either for better or worse. The full social, economic and political implications of this radical shift in the dissemination of information in the medical field have only just begun to be uncovered by scholars. This conference aims to open up discussion regarding all elements of this topic ca. 1660 to the present day.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Representation of, and writing by, medical practitioners in literary, visual and performing arts
• Medical self-fashioning.
• The role of gender in medicine (e.g. female apothecaries, midwives, cunning women, etc.)
• Definitions of medical writing and the role of genre
• European, Trans-Atlantic, Asian, and colonial medicine Satire – in all its forms – directed at medical practice, both lay and professional, including by medical people themselves
• Discourse and correspondence between practitioners, and practitioners and their patients.
• The nature of medical publishing

We welcome proposals from researchers across a range of disciplines and stages of career, including early career and student scholars. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography, to writingdocs18@gmail.com by Friday 15th November 2019. Papers will be invited on a wide variety of relevant topics from within the period. A selection of revised papers is expected to be published as part of the project outputs.

Conference Rates: £130 full delegates, £65 Concessions (PGR and Unwaged)

The Conference is organised by: Clark Lawlor; Ashleigh Blackwood; Allan Ingram; Leigh Wetherall-Dickson; Helen Williams and Laurence Sullivan (The Writing Doctors Team).

11-12 September 2020

University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

In recent years a body of work – including Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (2007), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (2012), William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (2017), William Blake and the Myth of America (2018), and The Reception of William Blake in Europe (2019) – has emerged around the posthumous reception of the artist and poet, William Blake. From almost complete obscurity following his death in 1827, Blake has become one of the most important figures in British cultural life. What is less understood, outside certain pockets such as the USA and Japan, is the significance of Blake elsewhere in the world.

Today, Blake’s global presence cannot be underestimated. The aim of this project is to showcase the wide variety of global ‘Blakes’ (after Morris Eaves’s “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t”, 1995, and Mike Goode’s “Blakespotting”, 2006) and to provide an overview of the appropriations and rewritings as well as examples, that fall into three categories: art, literature and music. It will examine how Blake’s global audiences have responded to his poetry and art as well as explore what these specific, non-British responses and cultural and social legacies can bring to the study of Blake. What is fascinating about works in art, literature and music inspired by Blake is the fact in which the verbal and the visual in Blake’s art translates into different cultural contexts in unique ways.

Building on The Reception of Blake in the Orient (2006) and The Reception of William Blake’s Reception in Europe (2019), part of the longstanding and successful series The Reception of British and Irish Authors with Elinor Shaffer as series editor, the organisers welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes) and panels (three 20-minute papers). Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Studies of influence in Literature, such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Kenzaburo Oe, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain Poets.
• Blake in translation
• Postcolonial Blake and Blake in world literatures and arts
• Blake and the theatre or performance
• Afterlives in art and exhibition culture, such as Rockwell Kent, Helen Martins, or Subir Hati.
• Blake and graphic novels and comics
• Setting Blake to music
• Reception by Women, People of Colour and LBGT+
• Blake and the digital age
• Routes of transmission: Blake and the web, social media, publishing houses, publishing histories and facsimiles
• Blake and literature written for children
• Blake and film, such as Jim Jarmusch, Derek Jarman, Hal Hartley
• Blake scholarship, including T.S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, S. Foster Damon, Leopold Damrosch, Donald Ault, Robert Gleckner, Hazard Adams, Harold Bloom and David Erdman, Mona Wilson and G.E. Bentley Jr.

Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biographical note (50 words in the same Word document) should be sent to Sibylle Erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk) and Jason Whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) by 29 February 2020.

Romanticism and Vision

28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)

University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.

For more details Click Here

The organizers of NASSR 2020 invite proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables–from scholars emerging and established, and in all areas of literary, philosophical, cultural, and artistic study–on the theme of “Romanticism and Vision.” In the field of Romanticism, the implications of “vision” as a keyword have changed dramatically over the last half-century, and have expanded to include (for example) the embodied senses, technologies of perception, visual and material culture, and the visual and performing arts. We welcome presentations that explore Romanticism’s connection to vision, the visual, and the visionary, understood in the widest possible sense. Approaches that broaden Romanticism’s disciplinary, geographical, and linguistic scope are especially welcome. In our echoing of the “Vision 2020” and “Beyond 2020” motif currently being deployed in academic, business, and public sectors, we aim to make this year’s conference an opportunity to consider the future of Romanticism as a critical field of humanist study, and to strategize about the role of Romanticism in shaping the future of the university.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Re-envisioning Romanticism: looking back and looking forward
• Visions and the visionary: perception, prognostication, projection, speculation, the speculative
• Ways of looking: reading, conceptualizing, observing, peeping, gazing, categorizing, examining, recognizing and misrecognizing
• Visual culture and aesthetics: objects of sight, spectacle, the spectacular, the sublime and the beautiful
• Reading methods and histories: careful, close, distant, surface; plagiarism, copyright law
• Print culture in its social, theoretical, and physical aspects (e.g. text, design, structure, layout); manuscripts, letters, journals, scrapbooks, books, journals, newspapers
• The seen and the unseen: noumena, phenomena, the spirit world, apparitions and appearances
• Romantic iconoclasm and anti-representationalism; ocularcentrism and “the tyranny of the eye”
• Visual communication: text, numbers, notation (e.g. musical), images, sign language, placards, banners, flags, gestures, hieroglyphs, emblems, insignia
• Questions of form and representation
• Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
• Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics
• Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
• Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
• Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
• Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
• Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
• Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
• Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
• The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
• Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
• Visualizing race: slavery, racism, racialization, minoritization
• Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
• Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
• Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
• Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
• Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society

Keynote Speakers:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University)
Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)

Special Seminar Leaders:
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London)

Timothy Campbell (University of Chicago)

William H. Galperin (Rutgers University)

Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton)

Grégory Pierrot (University of Connecticut at Stamford)

Padma Rangarajan (University of California, Riverside)

Gillian Russell (University of York)

Sophie Thomas (Ryerson University)

WEBSITE: http://sites.utoronto.ca/wincs/nassr2020

EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com