{"id":5530,"date":"2024-09-19T17:56:25","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T17:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5530"},"modified":"2024-09-19T17:56:25","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T17:56:25","slug":"cfp-romantic-shock-and-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5530","title":{"rendered":"CFP: Romantic Shock and Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Call for Papers: Romantic Shock and Surprise<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2025 Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorbonne Universit\u00e9, Paris, Friday 16 – Saturday 17 May 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keynote speakers: Christopher Miller (College of Staten Island, CUNY),<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephanie O\u2019Rourke (University of St Andrews)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018shock of the new\u2019 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\u2019s disruptive powers. Keats\u2019s dictum that poetry \u2018must surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity\u2019 is one example, posing the paradox that art can be simultaneously startling and unobtrusive. Shelley\u2019s provocative account of how poetry \u2018strips the veil of familiarity from the world\u2019 to lay bare the \u2018naked and sleeping beauty\u2019 beneath is another, one of many anticipations in Romantic thought of Ezra Pound\u2019s injunction, a century later, to \u2018make it new\u2019, or of the theory of defamiliarization propounded by the Russian Formalists. A third instance can be found in Wordsworth\u2019s ambition, at least according to Coleridge, to \u2018give the charm of novelty to things of every day\u2019 in his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads <\/em>project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This disruptive, defamiliarizing power was not confined to professedly innovative art. Archaism \u2013 the \u2018shock of the old\u2019 \u2013 was an equally potent force, exemplified by the Gothic novel (or Schauerroman<\/em>, \u2018shudder-novel\u2019), in which violent subject matter and fabricated medieval pasts were used to generate readerly frissons<\/em> from emotions of fear and repugnance. The German Sturm und Drang<\/em> 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 \u2018gentle<\/em> shock of miId<\/em> surprise\u2019 in \u2018There was a boy\u2019 are an index of this recalibration). According to Christopher Miller,[1]<\/a> 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 \u2018events\u2019 and linguistic special effects. Wordsworth\u2019s \u2018Surprised by Joy\u2019 is the paradigm but such unpredictable lyric \u2018plots\u2019 were ubiquitous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the drivers in this new affective poetics was political. When Shelley in his romantic epic The Revolt of Islam <\/em>spoke of the \u2018shock and surprise\u2019 of \u2018earthly minds\u2019, 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 \u2018the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded\u2019 in the wake of 1789. Hazlitt drew similar parallels in The Spirit of the Age<\/em>, much of which is devoted to analysis of the public addiction to a literature built around sensations of shock and surprise (\u2018A poem is to resemble an exhibition of fireworks \u2026 that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or warmth behind them\u2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019Rourke has shown,[2]<\/a> the idea that powerful artworks could produce responses equivalent to \u2018electric shock\u2019 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 \u2018was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning\u2019). 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 \u2018march of intellect\u2019 was anything but straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n