{"id":5699,"date":"2024-11-22T11:33:51","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T11:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5699"},"modified":"2024-11-22T11:33:51","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T11:33:51","slug":"call-for-papers-2025-conference-of-the-german-society-for-english-romanticism-ger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5699","title":{"rendered":"Call for Papers: 2025 Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2025 Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER)
Negotiations of Value in the Romantic Age
25-28 September 2025
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Campus Erlangen)<\/strong>

Keynote Speakers:
David Duff (London), Michelle Faubert (Manitoba), Joanna Rostek (Gie\u00dfen \/ Leipzig)

Several scholars have proposed that the turn of the 19th century saw a paradigmatic shift
in the understanding of the concept of value. In Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating
Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008), for instance, Mary Poovey
argued that, during the 17th and well into the 18th century, aesthetic and economic
conceptions of value were not yet seen as inherently opposed to each other. On the
contrary, one of the functions particularly of what she refers to as \u2018imaginative writing\u2019
had been to convey the meaning(s) and mechanisms of the credit economy as it had
gradually developed and gained in importance during the early modern age. With the
economic discourse becoming more and more dominant in the growing consumer
societies of the Western world, however, economic value began to be singled out. At the
same time, those invested in the aesthetic and ethico-philosophical domains also aimed
at distinguishing their respective disciplinary positions, including distinctive notions of
what counted as valuable, as being of worth. According to James Thompson, from the 18th
century, \u201cthe concept of value underwent profound transformation and was rearranged
into the various humanistic, financial, and aesthetic discourses that we know today\u201d (1).
Accordingly, it is only at the beginning of the 19th century that the philosophical
subdiscipline of axiology \u2013 the theory of value and valuation \u2013 began to take shape (cf. e.g.
Krobath). At the same time, writers such as William Wordsworth developed a specific
\u2018Romantic ideology\u2019 (McGann) of their own with which they sought to offer an alternative
value system: literature was conceptualised as having a value that could not be
measured by the logic of economic exchange. While these writers, especially in their
poetological works, took pains to characterise Poetry \u2013 capital-lettered \u2018Poetry\u2019 was
understood to include not only poetry in the narrow sense and imaginative literature as
such, but also painting, sculpture, architecture and so forth \u2013 as elevated above
materialistic concerns, they did not situate it beyond them in an absolute way either. After
all, as P.B. Shelley famously declared, poets, as \u201cthe unacknowledged legislators of the
world\u201d, must aim at \u201ctrue utility\u201d. Poetry was meant to have its very own use value.
In 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), Brian
Massumi claims that \u201c[t]he dominant notion of value in our epoch is economic\u201d (5). If he
is right and if it is also correct that the turn of the nineteenth century saw the irretrievable
splitting apart of previously cohering conceptions of value, an understanding of the
processes that led to and constituted this epistemic shift will indeed be crucial for
locating ourselves in the present. Accordingly, the conference is inspired by a relatively
recent approach in literary and cultural studies which, amongst other labels, has been
named \u2018economic criticism\u20191 and whose basic tenets and lines of investigation Ellen
Gr\u00fcnkemeier, Nora Ple\u00dfke and Joanna Rostek suggest to be the following:
Economic criticism (i) analyses how the economy and what is seen as its constitutive
elements (e.g. money, consumption, economic agents) are represented in literature,
film, visual arts, etc.; (ii) studies non-fiction about the economy (e.g. the foundational
texts of classical political economy or Marxism) as primary literature; (iii) scrutinises
activities and phenomena associated with the economy (e.g. shopping, work, class)
through the methodologies of cultural and literary studies; (iv) investigates how
economic frameworks influence the creation of literary and cultural products as well
as the production of knowledge in academic disciplines; (v) explores points of
convergence between terms, concepts, and methods of economics, literary, and
cultural studies (e.g. circulation, representation, value, utility). (117)

However, precisely because the Romantic conjuncture is complex, it will not be enough
to solely consider the literary and cultural as well as other domains through the lens of
\u2018the economy\u2019 (which economic criticism does not intend anyway). Instead, the
conference encourages a discussion about various discursive perspectives on value in
the Romantic Age by way of different theoretical and methodological approaches.
We invite you to submit proposals for 20-minute papers that shed light on all aspects that
touch on the notion of value and help to explain its dissemination during the Romantic
Age.
Papers may address but are of course not limited to aspects regarding<\/p>\n\n\n\n