Call for Papers: Romantic Shock and Surprise
2025 Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
Sorbonne Université, Paris, Friday 16 – Saturday 17 May 2025
Keynote speakers: Christopher Miller (College of Staten Island, CUNY),
Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St Andrews)
The ‘shock of the new’ is a phrase normally associated with Modernism but the aesthetics of shock has its roots in Romanticism, where notions of originality, novelty and surprise combined with the concept of the sublime and other theories of affect to create compelling new descriptions of art’s disruptive powers. Keats’s dictum that poetry ‘must surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity’ is one example, posing the paradox that art can be simultaneously startling and unobtrusive. Shelley’s provocative account of how poetry ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world’ to lay bare the ‘naked and sleeping beauty’ beneath is another, one of many anticipations in Romantic thought of Ezra Pound’s injunction, a century later, to ‘make it new’, or of the theory of defamiliarization propounded by the Russian Formalists. A third instance can be found in Wordsworth’s ambition, at least according to Coleridge, to ‘give the charm of novelty to things of every day’ in his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads project.
This disruptive, defamiliarizing power was not confined to professedly innovative art. Archaism – the ‘shock of the old’ – was an equally potent force, exemplified by the Gothic novel (or Schauerroman, ‘shudder-novel’), in which violent subject matter and fabricated medieval pasts were used to generate readerly frissons from emotions of fear and repugnance. The German Sturm und Drang movement in drama and melodrama was a related development, condemned by Wordsworth as a corrupting influence whose effects were to be counteracted by more subtle and salubrious forms of imaginative stimulation (the adjectival qualifiers of ‘gentle shock of miId surprise’ in ‘There was a boy’ are an index of this recalibration). According to Christopher Miller,[1] another strand in this complex web of generic displacements and rivalries was the appropriation by Romantic lyric poetry of the dynamics of surprise associated with eighteenth-century adventure narrative, now transposed into unexpected sequences of mental ‘events’ and linguistic special effects. Wordsworth’s ‘Surprised by Joy’ is the paradigm but such unpredictable lyric ‘plots’ were ubiquitous.
One of the drivers in this new affective poetics was political. When Shelley in his romantic epic The Revolt of Islam spoke of the ‘shock and surprise’ of ‘earthly minds’, he was remembering the psychic turbulence of the French Revolution, whose traumatic legacy for former liberals he sought to alleviate with his own immersive story of failed but redemptive revolution. The Marquis de Sade likewise connected the violence and extravagance of the Gothic novel with ‘the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded’ in the wake of 1789. Hazlitt drew similar parallels in The Spirit of the Age, much of which is devoted to analysis of the public addiction to a literature built around sensations of shock and surprise (‘A poem is to resemble an exhibition of fireworks … that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or warmth behind them’).
Another driver was science and technology. Public interest in the rapidly developing science of electricity, including the invention of the Voltaic pile, generated a rich metaphorical vocabulary for describing aesthetic experience. As Stephanie O’Rourke has shown,[2] the idea that powerful artworks could produce responses equivalent to ‘electric shock’ gained widespread currency, as did the idea that electrical currents were analogous to other forms of rapid, high-energy transmission, notably the spread of revolutionary politics. Theatres harnessed the emergent technology to create startling new stage spectacles, encouraging a similarly spectacular acting style (as Coleridge famously remarked, seeing Edmund Kean act ‘was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’). Other scientific and cultural fields contributed their own share of shocks and surprises, challenging writers to match their discoveries and reinforcing the idea that the ‘march of intellect’ was anything but straightforward.
This two-day symposium will explore the sources and effects of this new poetics, examining manifestations of aesthetic shock and surprise across a wide spectrum of Romantic literature from Britain and beyond. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of this broad theme. Topics may include but are not confined to:
- shock and excess in the theory of the sublime
- Romantic shock and the eighteenth-century emphasis on the new
- affect theory and the cognitive poetics of shock and surprise
- shock and surprise in the literature of revolution
- tales of the unexpected in Romantic prose and verse
- shifting thresholds of aesthetic shock; ‘shock fatigue’
- gendered aesthetics of surprise and shock
- shock and surprise in Gothic fiction, poetry and drama
- shell-shock and post-traumatic stress in the Romantic literature of war
- shock as a propaganda tool in anti-slavery literature
- rhetorical and grammatical production of surprise
- analogies between scientific and literary shock
- shock and surprise in the language of advertising
- flashes, explosions and other spectacular effects on the Romantic stage
Please send title of paper and abstract (300 words), with brief CV, to Laurent Folliot lfolliot@yahoo.fr and David Duff d.duff@qmul.ac.uk by 1 December 2024
For further information, contact: info@londonparisromantic.com or visit: http://londonparisromantic.com/
Scientific Committee: Professor Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes/ Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais), Professor David Duff (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université), Professor Jean-Marie Fournier (Université Paris Diderot), Professor Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Université de Lille/ Institut Universitaire de France), Professor Marc Porée (ENS Ulm, Paris).