International Conference
19-20 May 2022, Université de Paris
Keynote speaker : Pr Nicholas Halmi, University of Oxford
The aim of this conference is to identify various Romantic-period clichés and to analyse how they were built and played with. This will lead us to question the construction of a so-called Romantic identity in literary criticism, but also more generally in collective representations.
The word “cliché” was coined in the 19th century and originally referred to a stereotype block that could reproduce types or images repeatedly. The word now characterises “a phrase or expression regarded as unoriginal or trite due to overuse” (OED). Alternatives to the term “cliché” include words such as “commonplace” and “topos”. Any trope, image, figure, and theme can potentially become a cliché. This very intricate concept raises the issue of artistic originality both in terms of literary creation and of reception. This conference stems from the observation that clichés are often easily identified, but rarely examined under a critical lens. When and how does a phrase, an image, a theme, or a figure become a cliché? Is repetition enough to transform a trope into a cliché, as suggested by its etymological root? As writers of the Romantic period rarely used this word, one of the aims of this conference is also to translate it into the critical and poetical language of that time.
In many countries, Romanticism is nowadays often associated with popular sentimental images and figures which distort and impoverish its original contents, turning for instance the concept of absolute love in Novalis’ works into a symbol of mawkishness (“fleur bleue”, in French). The cliché is thus both an effacing of meaning through repetition and a reduction or a parody, which raises issues of reception. Among other possible approaches, this could spur our delegates to examine the ideological implications of turning Romanticism into a cliché. For instance, to what extent did T.S. Eliot’s desire to turn Percy Shelley’s political stance in his earlier utopian poems into a cliché participate in a more general attempt to define literature outside of the realm of politics? Indeed, the concept of the “cliché” has often been used as a weapon by later authors and critics to downplay the subversive dimension of Romantic literature and to define it as an outworn paradigm. This phenomenon was already under way during the Romantic period – for instance, John Keats was often charged with Cockney sentimentality by Tory reviewers, exposing the complex connections between cliché, taste,
and class. In Germany, many features of Romanticism which were conceptualized by Charles de Villers and Madame de Staël at the beginning of the 19th century, were associated to spirituality and led to the juxtaposition of Romanticism and idealism, creating an ethereal German Romantic identity. This construction proves particularly enduring, although Novalis underlines in his works the importance of the body and reflects in his fragments on the implications of transcendental medicine.
However, the concept of the cliché can also be useful to analyse the way Romantic writers defined literary creation. One could say that Wordsworth, in the ‘Preface’ to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, aims to forsake the clichés of 18th -century poetic diction. Percy Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry (§3), defines poetic art as a way to revitalize dead metaphors, that is, commonplaces and clichés. In Don Juan, Byron repurposes the cliché of Don Juan as an active seducer, turning him into a prey for women. Yet, to what extent is this conception of literary creation a modernistic cliché that we retrospectively apply to the Romantic period?
Romantic writers also gained mastery over these clichés by playing with them, sometimes unwittingly reinforcing them – Percy Shelley, for instance, in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ plays with the cliché of the evil Romantic poet by describing himself as an “Archimago”, and largely contributed with Adonais to the construction of the cliché of the frail, feminised Romantic poet.
In France, Romanticism is often reduced to the post-1830 cliché of Mussetian sentimentalism, which Flaubert notoriously debunked in Madame Bovary, thus distorting and obscuring the legacy of other French Romantic writers such as Lamartine or Vigny. Reflecting on the concept of the Romantic cliché from a French perspective is therefore a way to underline how French Romanticism was adulterated and deformed by later conservative writers and by the appearance of a new paradigm of reading which derides the ambition of Romantic writers to
philosophize. Finally, moving on to an often less studied linguistic area, one cannot but notice the complexity of the appropriation of Romanticism in 19th-century Danish literature. For instance, in Jens Peter Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880), Romanticism is both conjured up as a source of evocative images and ironically rejected. The eponymous character uses his Romantic clothing as a means of seduction which he can nonetheless abandon instantly. These examples underscore the complexity of the construction of the so-called Romantic
identity. Accordingly, we intend our conference to be cliché-ridden in the widest possible sense:
- cliché, repetition and Romantic irony
- cliché and tribute
- cliché, artistic originality and Romantic genius
- cliché as ideological debunking of Romanticism
- genealogy / cartography of the Romantic cliché
- …
The conference falls within the scope of comparative studies and we hope this will enable us to compare diverse receptions of Romanticism. We welcome panoramic proposals as well as proposals addressing a specific linguistic area (British, Irish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian Romanticisms…).
Please submit abstracts of 300 to 500 words to Pauline Hortolland and Florence Schnebelen: pauline.hortolland@etu.u-paris.fr ; florence.schnebelen@uha.fr
Deadline: 30 March 2022